As we get ready to move our website (over 13,000 pages) into a new WCM system, I've been thinking a lot about content. We've spent considerable time on design & navigation issues, and the tools for creating websites, but in comparison, we've spent only minimal time tending to the actual content that we're posting. The more I scrutinize our website, the more certain I am that we simply have too much content, too many pages with long blocks of text that we're originally written for a brochure or some other printed publication.
We need to turn our attention to what information we're posting. The Web Development Team recently offered a "Writing for the Web" workshop. Enrollment was higher than we expected, which confirms for me that the time is right for us to concentrate on content. It's time to weed the garden. Clean house. Or maybe a "relocation" metaphor is more apt. Remember the last time you moved to a new home or apartment? You didn't just pack up everything you owned and move it. You cleaned and sorted and threw things away. That's what we have the opportunity to do. Even though it's possible that we could import our entire website into our new WCM, that might not be the best thing.
I think it's time for us to clean out our closets and drawers, to streamline, and take a good hard look at what's worth packing up in boxes and what's just baggage that we've been dragging around.
