You get out what you put in - setting realistic expectations

We always advise our clients to give some serious thought to the ongoing management of a new website or intranet when they are at the pre-planning stage.

Whilst creating a new digital presence is a big job in itself, keeping on top of updates, developing new features and implementing changes to a published site is also a major task.

There are two important ways to help make ongoing site management effective

  1. One is to design the site so that it is practical and manageable (ie not full of multiple sections and sub-sections and links that will fall over when changes are made);
  2. The other is to ensure that everyone involved in the upkeep of the site is clear about their responsibilities and your expectations from the start. You need to draw up guidelines for content management as part of your project plan and get buy-in from the various teams before you commit them to managing important digital content.

So when you are considering a new website or intranet project, factor in plenty of time to talk to your key internal stakeholders about the level of involvement you might need from them. Content creation and publishing can be a big task for some teams so they need to think about who will take on that responsibility and how they will manage that alongside their main roles.

Find out how much time they will have to develop and update their content on a published site, check what skills they have, whether they will be able to make their own updates or whether you will need to find someone to do this for them. Do you need to organise training around using content management systems or will staff be able to just pick this up from day one?

Sereno can also contribute to this conversation and help to make things more manageable by suggesting tools and automated processes that will help to make content publishing easier and more efficient.

Have you got any content planning-related tips? Let us know below.