There is probably no worse strategy for an intranet or public website than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start.

Joe the manager picks up a jug. Inside that jug is milk that is curdled, sour and foul smelling. As Joe shakes the jug the solids and water separate and slosh about and the smell rises further, choking the air. Joe has a problem.

How is Joe going to solve this problem? Here is the traditional web management solution. Joe decides he needs a new jug. Joe gets a team together to decide what sort of jug is needed. They specify a really cool, all-dancing, all-singing, high-tech portal jug and they go out and spend a lot of money on it.

Then what happens? Another team is assembled to take the old jug and migrate its contents into the new portal jug. Once all the putrefied milk has been drained into the new portal jug there’s high-fives and lattes all-round. Job well done, Joe! Project complete.

If you’ve been involved in the Web for a while then the above story will be all-too-familiar to you. It is nothing less than shocking how little attention and genuine strategic focus most managers give to their websites. Even in 2008, I’m still coming across stone-age strategies that revolve around buying cool new technology.

From a management perspective, content has little or no value. It does not even deserve to be managed. Whether it is good or bad is irrelevant. Just shovel it onto the website. If it was written for print, so what? Just shovel it onto the website. The old website didn’t work? Buy new technology and hire a fancy graphics agency. The content? Just migrate/shovel it over from the old website.

You get the website you deserve. Quality content is at the heart of all great websites. This sounds like a self-evident, no-brainer statement. However, as we approach 2009, it still needs repeating.

Taking your old intranet content and migrating it into a new software system is doomed to failure. If your website isn’t working then ask this question: why isn’t the website working? Is it because of the technology? Is it because of the graphics and the layout? Or is it because of the content? Nine-times-out-of-ten it will be the content.

Content migration—and its first cousin, website “redesign”—are all about pouring sour old milk into new portal jugs. At some stage, we have to address the core web management challenges. Why do we have such bad content?
1. We allow the organization to publish puff, fluff and vanity, instead of focusing on the needs of our customers/staff.
2. We don’t hire web content professionals. Instead we find the most junior person in the department and give them the job of managing the website.
3. We don’t see the Web as a unique medium—we just take print content and print thinking and shovel it onto the Web.
4. We don’t review and quality control. We have practically no processes to take old content off our website.

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.

I recently worked with an organization that had managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its website. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of effort to build up an internal consensus that actually deleting content was a good idea.

“You can’t delete that,” people would say, “because you never know when someone might need it.” Even content that had become out-of-date and was now actually misleading was defended. “I don’t have time to review or delete,” was another excuse.

Working with another organization I found a page that was old and contained content that was now clearly wrong and misleading. “You can’t delete that,” the web manager said to me tersely.
“Why not?” I replied.
“It will hurt our search engine optimization.”

It will what? This web manager—to call him a manager, I know, is stretching the meaning of the word—had become a search engine optimization fanatic. (There are quite a few out there.)

Blindly, he believed that the more pages he had, and the more content he had on each of these pages, the more likely he was to get found in search engines. (As if getting found was the Holy Grail of web management.) Bringing customers to a page with wrong content is like bringing customers into a car salesroom to show them your cars that won’t start and have scratches all over the paintwork.

Back to the website that deleted lots of its content. It was hard going. It took leadership. Compromises had to be made. Some content was not deleted but was changed so that it would not be found when customers used the search engine.

The results were more dramatic than anyone could have imagined. Customer satisfaction with the website had remained stubbornly low for several years despite many other initiatives. Well, when they deleted the content, customer satisfaction shot up. Why?

Most customers come to your website to complete top tasks. The more irrelevant and out of date pages of content you have, the greater the chances they will arrive on these pages. There is simply nothing worse than presenting a customer with useless content. It infuriates them, wastes their time, and drives them away from your website like a plague.

Every time I hear the word “redesign” I shiver a little. The website has grown more and more useless because of badly managed and out-of-date content. Management should have mandated the boring, politically difficult and thankless work of regularly removing poor quality content.

Instead, many web managers—particularly the newly appointed ones—want to do a redesign. This is much more fun. It involves hiring latte-drinking, cool-haircut web designers, who will eulogize the brand and dress up the first couple of levels of the website in shiny new graphics.

But the rot of out-of-date, badly organized content remains. The organization feels good because it has ‘done something’. But what has it done? It has engaged in the classic, ever-popular pastime of putting lipstick on a pig.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

It often seems that the primary purpose of localization is to create unreadable English that is cheap to translate into unreadable German.

A great many organizations do not believe content has any real value. They see it is as a cost, a necessary evil. Thus, they want to produce content for the lowest possible cost.

This approach leads to awful websites that lose sales, infuriate customers and damage the brand and reputation of the organization. What senior managers in particular have failed to realize is that these days the first impression many customers get of an organization comes from its website. First impressions last.

Let’s say that the primary market of the organization is America. Whatever attention the American website gets, you can be pretty sure the Japanese or German versions will get much less.

A large European multinational once ran a workshop in Japan with a view to helping it do a better job on its Japanese website. During the workshop the team was shocked to find out that hardly any of the Japanese customers in the room were going to the Japanese website. Instead, they were going to the English version. Why?

“The English version at least has a chance of being up-to-date,” one Japanese gentleman stated. “And the quality of the Japanese is not very good.” I dealt with a Danish company once who I’m sure had a very good Danish-language website, but whose English-language version was awful.

I want to let you in on a secret: You don’t get brownie points for trying on the Web. Web customers are ruthlessly impatient, skeptical and cynical. They don’t look at your badly translated content and say: “Well, at least they tried. I think I’ll buy from them.”

Do you know what some organizations are doing in order to address the problem of having to have multiple-language websites? You won’t believe this unless you work for a large multinational. Pull up your chair. Take a deep breath.

What they’re doing is reducing the quality of the content of the primary language so that it’s cheaper to translate. Here’s the way a typical conversation goes:
“You can’t write it like that.”
“Why not?”
“Those words are not easily translatable. You have to use these words that are easy to translate.”
“But these are not the words that our customers use.”
“Doesn’t matter. You still have to use them. Saves money for the organization.”

You may have heard the old saying: “penny-wise, pound-foolish.” Well it truly, truly applies to how many organizations manage—mismanage—their content. Somebody please tell these people who run these content sweatshops that in a race to the bottom everyone ultimately loses.

Cheap, badly-written, awfully-translated content spends its toxic life circling the drain. But it never really flushes away. It just leaves a stain on your reputation and brand. And if you don’t believe that then you don’t believe in the power of the Web.

Gerry McGovern
mailto:gerry@gerrymcgovern.com

On the Web, nothing is more damaging to your organization’s reputation and brand than out of date content.

On Monday September 8, 2008, a story about a UAL bankruptcy began circulating on the Web. (UAL is the parent company of United Airlines.) Within hours of the story’s being released, UAL’s shares had dropped by 76 percent.

The story was 6 years old.

For some reason, the story had been added to the “Most Viewed” link section on the homepage of a Florida newspaper. From there, Google News picked it up, and the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

It’s easy to put content up on a public website or intranet. In fact, the content management software industry has made distributed publishing a key selling point. Basically, the more published, the merrier.

This is a totally unprofessional approach to website management. But the unmanaged distributed publishing model is attractive to organizations that do not value content. Such organizations want to find the cheapest and fastest possible way to deal with content. The cheapest way is to buy some software, give people basic training in how to use it, and then let them at it.

The easiest decision of all is to publish everything you have. Take all that print stuff and just PDF it. Take anything that’s digital and put it up on that great big website. It’s a “have gigabytes must fill” mentality. If you publish everything, nobody can blame you for leaving something out. It’s just that nobody can find anything.

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