This is the final post in my little series on how to approach a content migration. I’ve talked about some of the planning tasks, as well as things to do throughout the migration. Now the end is in site. You’ve manually cut and pasted hundreds – if not thousands – of pages into your new site. What an effort.
Don’t lose focus
The key to this stage is not to let the quality of your work decline are you count down to the go live of your new site. You should have in place a thorough quality assurance process, as well as an approach for handling any errors or problems that occur. A content freeze on the existing site (where no one makes any content changes for a period of time) will give you some breathing space to go through the new site and check it’s all working.
Prioritise fixes
In the big migrations that I’ve worked on, we usually rank errors to help prioritise how they are fixed. Severity (sev) 1 and sev 2 errors are show-stoppers, something that you can’t go live with. Sev 3 and sev 4 errors do impact the user experience, but the site is still essentially functional. If you do go live with errors (and be realistic, there will be some), make sure you have an agreed time frame in which they will be addressed.
Finally…
Take the opportunity of a content migration to implement an automatic maintenance process (most content management systems have one) to ensure that pages are flagged for review after a nominated period of time. It will make your job a whole lot easier.
Now I know that there are many other things to think about during a content migration – everything from maintaining team moral, to managing client expectations. I’ll aim to cover some of these other topics in the future, in the mean time – what have been your experiences?
