These were the slides used in the "Rightsizing your digital presence" workshop at Confab Intensive 2017.
Regardless of the size or complexity of an organization, its digital presence is often unnecessarily large given the organization’s scope. But rightsizing is tough. We look at how to discard unnecessary content, both from the perspective of the one-time effort (such as during a migration) and on an ongoing basis.
4. The cost of bulk
• Difficult to find information…
• … for your audience / internally
• … for content you know is there / that is entirely hidden or buried
• … for browse / search
• Difficult to cross-sell / reward being “close”
• Inaccurate information
• Difficult to make broad improvements
• Incomplete information
• Project low quality
• Difficult internally to understand and optimize
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6. The benefit of bulk
• Please internal stakeholders
• Easier to think in-the-moment/narrowly rather than long-
term/broadly
• Ability to create target pages (for search engines) for narrow
topics
• Avoid difficult conversations
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12. Why is rightsizing difficult?
• Most of the ”benefits” of bulk
• Difficulty to imagine end state
• Difficulty to define how to get there
• Difficulty in how to get buy-in
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17. … but sometimes fixing content is more
useful…
especially merge
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18. … and other times leaving it there but
isolating it makes sense (levels of “archive”).
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19. Exercise: look at representative pages
to decide on dispositions
http://memory.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html
/sousa/sousa-timeline.html
https://www.loc.gov/collections/john-philip-sousa/
Also see other examples:
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41. Factors in deciding disposition
Business Goals
• Extend / promote / enable business goals
• Lead generation / affiliation / purchase / repeat
purchase
• Project “who you are”
Audience Demand
• Off-site demand
• On-site demand
General Quality
• Allow visitor to get information they want without
another click (especially by providing context)
• Demonstrated commitment to quality
• ROT
Implementation Realities
• Dispositions and estimates
• Available people / money / resources
• Underlying “product catalog”
• Existing work program
• Politics and worldview
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44. • Can you define any rules (what the logical bucket is and what
the disposition is) for some of the content (perhaps just one
bucket)?
• Exactly what content / what is the content count for the
bucket(s)?
Download the exercise spreadsheet at
http://hobbs.direct/confab2017-sheet2
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