Wrestling the content monster

Wrestling The Content Monster

How liverpool.gov.uk was tamed

Us

liverpool.direct

Public & Private

Me

@conormoody

What use is strategy if you can’t implement?

could, should, might, perhaps, one day, longer-

term, consider, asses, talk, discuss, review, compare, benchmark

Or… Don’t save the world

Wrestling with large content

• Looking at what you’ve got

• Where do you want to be?

• Building a realistic strategy to get there

• Having a plan

• What you get at the end

• Things we learnt along the way

A long hard look in the ugly mirror

Content-heavy pages

Not very relevant to

the user

Lots of “what we do”

Whatever……

The important thing is here

Off the (gov) shelf IA

How was it getting used?

Over 4000 pages on the site

%went to just 200 of them

of traffic

“no one” reads the news

• Less than 2% of site traffic

• 10 news items took 64% of news traffic

• The 10 weren’t really ‘news’

none formed part of a top 20 user tasks

strategies, policies and plans

And the organisation ?

Our cms users

• Not unusual for a council….

• Devolve precious asset to:

– Anyone who has a PC

• Half day training

• Not content professionals

• Have fulltime job

• No incentive to reduce contact

• If measured, then wrong metric (volume, compliance etc)

Our cms usage

• 260 trained• 20 performed 70% of all activity

• 160 did something• Activity not related to Top Tasks

Customers want:

Organisation v customer

BrandDo-it online

Popular Links

Images

Contact Benefits My Neighbourhood

News

Promo

Site Elements (Navigation, Whitespace, etc)

Jobs

Leisure

Libraries

Rubbish

Contact

News

BusinessTransport

SearchBenefits

Planning

Education

The Council

The Rest

Homepage space allocation (%) If pure demand was followed (%)

Me

@kevinjump

Reality check

The organisation and the customer didn’t agree.

A pragmatic strategy

A pragmatic strategy

• focus on the important things

• control the message

• get sustainable management

The plan

How to go about it all

The plan

• Centralise content management

• Refocus efforts based on user demand

• Simplify the voice of the site

• Enable oversight on performance

Practicalities

Site rebuild in progress

Technically; to much was broken

Segmentation of content

A focus on IA

Communication to the business

Results

New site in 6 months.

Results

• 4000 is now 400

• Measure contact on the site

• Evidence based change improvement model (content / design / service delivery)

• Impact on business

– Online up

– Offline down

Lessons learnt

1. we are a large organisation with lots of politics

A devolved content model makes it hard to focus

Unless you have serious resources…

Do strategy, but don’t major on it

Evidence rules!

Assume authority

You are the subject-matter expert

Don’t save the world

Give yourself something to do tomorrow

Content has a cost

With limited resources, focus on the stuff that matters