Out With The Old…
Written September 5th, 2007 by Delia McIntyre-CarterI often joke that we have two members who help our small team get it all done — Smoke and Mirrors. The truth is we get by with a lot of help from friends in other departments. Our group of six relies on robust content management systems to enable staff outside of Interactive Communications to upload content to our Internet, Intranet and Spanish language sites. Web administrators assigned to each area have come to feel empowered by it all, even though many disliked the notion of the additional responsibility at first.
Now there is but one kink in the well-oiled machine. No one is removing anything. We have people adding to the sites daily, but when it comes to actually managing what’s there we have few takers. Try as we might, we have yet to successfully convey the importance of setting expiration dates, eliminating outdated content and documents and getting rid of old links. We have tried to tackle this ourselves, but quickly realized that even when dates are present, it’s difficult to make editorial decisions about content we didn’t create. Besides, one of our goals in enlisting the help was to get others vested in the Web site as full partners.
So why aren’t web administrators willing to re-visit what they previously posted? Perhaps it’s because people are hard-pressed to find time to post content in the first place. Or, maybe it’s because complaints from the site-searching public come directly to us and not to them. Whatever the reason, we have to find a way to fix the problem. The old stuff makes us all look dated and takes up valuable space in our CMS.
Surely someone out there has been through this and come up with some solutions. I’m curious to know how others are handling this issue.
September 5th, 2007 at 10:06 am
We too have this problem. We have a laundry list of articles that physicians and nurses wrote within our Wellness section of the Web site. The problem is that the list has become so long, you really can’t find what you’re looking for. And, in the process, you might stumble on an article from 2004. Ick!
I took the initiative and went to our Answer Line nurses. They have been extremely helpful in creating articles for our publications. My contact there was more than willing to take on the task of going over the old articles (anything before 2005) and deleting unnecessary ones. If the information is still consistent, we either reapprove it or combine it with a newer article (which also decreases multiple articles about the same subject).
The problem with this procedure, however, is that it’s taking a long, long time. With just one person looking over it, she’s overwhelmed on her one day of office work. Likewise, my schedule is pretty full of reorganizing, structuring, and making sure our e-publications go out. The conclusion has resulted in a partially completed list of articles that need to be reapproved or deleted sitting behind me while I type here instead.
Eventually, when my schedule gets a bit clearer, I’ll get to the articles. But this has been in the plans for almost five months now. By the time I get to the articles, it will be time for her to go through 2005. And it will start over.
If your robust CMS has a workflow tool, I would absolutely recommend scheduling your old articles for reapproval ahead of time. Perhaps 5 or 10 articles per week. Or maybe 50 per month. (Keep it small and quick.. they will build up like it has for me!) But schedule it on your editors’ workflows so they have to do it and mark it as completed. That’s the best solution I’ve come up with yet. Unfortunately we don’t have such a system in place (yet!), but we hope to in the future. That will make this particular task go much more quickly and efficiently.
September 10th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
Thanks Thomas. This insight is helpful.
I’ll see if we can adopt some of the things you mention here. It’s overwhelming when you have to schedule the scheduling, isn’t it?
September 10th, 2007 at 3:22 pm
Haha. We’ve actually had good success meeting together and making sure we’re on the right track. We hold a monthly one-on-one just to make sure we’re getting things done. But with some larger tasks on my plate right now, I’ve been neglecting the list that looms behind me. “Later this week!” I say. It will most likely be next week.