Content Strategy and Migration

WARNING!

Your existing content may not:

be specifically written for the web
have obvious metadata (e.g. keywords, content owners, executive summary, date to be archived)
have a clear summary / description

To create clear, relevant content with searchable metadata, your content collation, editing, and uploading requires time and thought. It's not a process of simple data entry.

For guidance on writing good web copy, see Writing for the Web

Contact content owners

Your current intranet may be out-of-date (or non-existent!). Additionally, through the research process we may uncover new areas of content required.

We recommend contacting relevant staff as early as possible.

Sample contact form:

Information request form

Sign-off from owners

Content owners (as identified in the interviews and content audit) must confirm if their content is complete and up-to-date or not.

If an existing contact cannot be found, in general, the content should not be transferred to the new intranet.

Manual content upload

Depending on your budget SmallWorlders can do none, some or all of your content transfer and upload.

For example, we could upload content to one business critical section as a template. Using this initial section as a guide, local teams can then take on the task of uploading their remaining content.

Digitising forms

Requirements are discussed with form owners. Together we will review/check the following

the form is not already being developed within another system
it aligns with your current workflow/process
its free-text fields to see if they should be selectable lists (e.g. a dropdown)
the form's approval process. Who needs to approve the form? Is it always the same individual, or does it depend on the submitter?
the logic and flow of the form. Are related fields grouped? Are mandatory questions obvious?

After the review an online form will be built using the site Forms Tool:

Digital form example

Bulk upload by script

It's possible to migrate / import files using scripts. Don't be fooled though - this method is not fully automatic. It requires the same level of thought as uploading each file manually.

Work required

The files are exported from the existing intranet and organised appprioately
Each file name is entered into a spreadsheet (file names must be exact)
Add metadata into separate columns, including author, summary, keywords and final location
A custom script is written to import the files
The script is applied and tested

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and reducing duplication

APIs can be used to export data from a website or share information between two sites.

For example, you may already have team and service information on your organisation's website. In this situation we would simply sync the website data with the intranet's database.

This means you only upload / amend the information one location, but it will be up-to-date, accurate and searchable on both your website and intranet.

Note:

Future changes to either the source data or the API are likely to affect the accuracy of the intranet data
In these cases, any changes which need to be made to the API sync will be charged