Migrating content from your old website? Here is a simple, yet über-effective tip…
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Thousands of pages, countless sections and subsections, hidden forms, forgotten PDFs and a global navigation buckling under the weight of 5 years worth of constant updates and additions. And now it has to be you in charge of migrating this unruly mess to your organisation’s brand new website and CMS.
It took years of hard work for the content to come together and everyone agrees there is some good stuff in there. But where do you start? Here is a trick to help you develop some criteria by which you can decide what to do with all this content.
- List all main content sections of the old/current website. Include Level 1 and 2 of the navigation and go even deeper if needed. Do not try to maintain the current tree structure – all you need is a single list.
- Sort the sections by importance to your business. Your criteria might be commercial value, lead generation, retention, brand communication, content dissemination, PR, etc.
- Then sort the same list of sections based on popularity. Your Web Analytics solution will tell you what the popularity of each section is, based on traffic, impressions, session length, bounce rate, goal success rate, etc.
The table below then gives you some simple advice on how to assess the importance of each section and what actions to take:
| Importance to the business | Popularity (no of page impressions) |
Priority | Actions to take |
| Important | Popular | 1 | – Give this content a premier spot on the homepage – Place link top/left on main navigation structure – Use a strong and bold call to action, but no need for contextualisation, benefits, etc. – Repeat links and call to action on each page |
| Important | Unpopular | 2 | – Feature content above the fold on the homepage but place to the column on the far right – Repeat links and call to action subtly on each page, but include benefits and reasons why user should be interested – Make frequent references in the body copy and include links – Promote via your blog, email newsletter, Twitter, etc. – Potentially incentivise visits |
| Unimportant | Popular | 3 | These pages should not be wasted. Use them to cross-sell and to draw attention to Priority 2 content that needs all the help it can get |
| Unimportant | Unpopular | None | Be brave and get rid of it |
