Part 1: Take control of your content with clear guidelines

Part 1: Take control of your content with clear guidelines

The organisation ABC has decided to improve their website, which they launched in 1999. They hire an agency and appoint a project group. The starting point for the client at ABC is to focus on the technology. "We just migrate the content. It's fine as it is."

But, wow, how many pages are on the website! When the project team starts digging through the pages, several problems come to the surface. The web team says: "We don't have an overview! We can't do all this!" And those responsible for the content: "We can't find our own content on the website! And we don't know what our visitors find!" ABC’s customer service is a testament to many confused conversations with users who have found outdated pages and pages with incorrect information. The project group also realises that the old web pages are difficult to navigate, especially for users with functional disabilities.

And on top of that, everyone at ABC has a nagging sensation: Isn't an unreasonably large website a burden on the environment? Doesn't that mean a negative carbon footprint?

Guidelines for clarity and sustainability

What to do? The project manager draws up a plan with his/her project team, and together they go to work. Long-term sustainability is a fundamental part of the plan. The aim is to produce guidelines that everyone who works with the web can follow, and which they can spread throughout the organisation. But since they know that it is difficult to create guidelines without context, they decide to work in an integrated way: guidelines can be developed as work progresses.

The work of taking control of the content is carried out in three stages, which will also be reflected in the guidelines:

1. Check the site's visitor statistics.
2. Decide whether pages should be improved, merged or deleted.
3. Remove pages correctly.

Check the site's visitor statistics.

The project group starts work to find out how many visitors the different pages have. They use analyisis tools to see both recent page views and page views over a longer period of time. If a page is to convert visitors to an action, they will also measure the target against the page and see how well it converts.

The project group can already confirm that there are many pages that could be removed. They make a list of websites that have few visits or low conversion rates.

Improve, merge or delete?

Once they know how each page is performing, it’s time to think about why. Is it difficult to find the page via links and navigation? Does the page not capture the keywords that target groups are searching for? Maybe there are several pages on the site competing for the same keyword? The project team also questions the pages: Does each page have a clear purpose and desire for conversion?

It turns out that there are lots of pages that overlap, both in terms of content and keywords. No pages can be found via the menus. And many pages have unclear purposes and goals.

The project team will now go through the list of pages and decide on three types of actions:

• Improve the page so that it gets more visitors or conversions, for example, by pointing the text at other keywords or making the page visible in the menu and through links.
• Merge several pages into one.
• Delete pages.

If the project group cannot agree on what to do with a page, they go to the project manager, who decides the matter, usually in cooperation with experts.

There is now a plan to delete the pages and to make the pages that remain much better. And they take the lessons learned with them into the guidelines.

Delete pages correctly

Some pages simply have to be removed. And the ones that need to be removed, they remove correctly, so that they don't break any links to the page that ends up in the trash bin. Many broken links can have a negative impact on SEO.

Therefore, they always do two things when they remove a page:

• De-index the page so that it does not appear in search results.
• Redirect the page’s URL to another appropriate page on the website.

Cleaned website and guidelines in place

The project group has now removed almost half of the original pages. They have also formulated guidelines for how everyone at ABC can think when they want to create new pages, merge and delete web pages. The web team takes responsibility for managing the guidelines. The project group also proposes a network that will be given the opportunity to develop the guidelines on an ongoing basis. Naturally, the network includes experts.

They complement the guidelines by describing who is responsible for what: The web team decides which web pages to have, as they have an overview of the site. Experts contribute knowledge of the content.

Now they want to spread the word throughout ABC. They hold briefings and training sessions on the guidelines and allocation of responsibilities, and they clearly notice that they are long-awaited. A sense of security spreads when everyone knows what the rules are.

Take control of the content with clear guidelines – then you will contribute to these goals

Everything is now well and good. A lot of pages have been removed, without losing important content. But which of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals has the project group contributed to?

• Goal 7: Sustainable energy for all
  The project has probably reduced ABC’s need for energy by reducing the number of websites.
• Goal 8: Decent work and economic growth
  ABC employees avoid the stress of having a website they don't know about. It is now easy to get an overview of your own areas of responsibility on the website and intranet.
• Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production
  ABC has ensured that web production is sustainable in the long term, as there are now guidelines for deleting content and guidelines for posting new content – and who should do it.

Read more about the organisation ABC in parts 2 and 3 of our blog. Part 2 will describe how ABC used the form of the websites to make the website searchable and easily accessible to everyone. Part 3 discusses the linguistic expression on the website.