When you’re moving house, you don’t take all the old junk with you. It’s the same when you’re building a new website.”
Ash Pickering, Senior UX design
Ash Pickering, Senior UX designOne of the most demanding tasks in creating a new website is in the content migration and styling phase.
We coordinate an intensive content audit with you, to establish what current content is working for you, where duplications or redundancies lie, and what pages or content can be jettisoned rather than moved.
Think of it as an opportunity to spring clean, and pack the surviving content neatly and properly.
How do you know what to take?
Websites seem to grow organically over time, and when it comes time to create a new one, at least some of what’s on your current site may be outdated, irrelevant or not contributing to your brand or sales.
So as part of our preparatory work we conduct an audit of your content, including a traffic analysis and a search for duplicated (or similar) content that can confuse or deter search engines. That way we can identify your highest performing content, which obviously needs to be prioritised, and that which is unnecessary or may even be having a negative effect on optimisation.
A clean sweep.
The audit allows us to determine whether the content to be migrated appropriately reflects your brand and its values, whether its tone or substance meets your business’s current needs, whether it needs to be updated in any way, or if it should go straight to the trash.
Having a clean sheet means we can also identify content that should be refreshed or new content that could be added in response to user queries or requirements.
A map is always handy.
Following the audit, we compile a complete inventory covering all of your content, including metadata, different media types, how and where your information is classified and stored, and how and where all of it needs to be migrated to.
We can then map the entire migration, ensure that all the right human, hardware and software resources are allocated, and manage the process with meticulous care.
Why a perfect migration is vital.
Site integrity.
Over time links get broken, URLs are poorly named or broken, and other technical problems creep into your website. A properly managed website migration and styling restores all links, ensures naming conventions are followed, and that the site runs smoothly and quickly.
Brand style consistency.
Our migration process ensures that every aspect of the corporate identity rule book are followed – colour palettes, fonts, grammar and tone, image guidelines, logo usage and so much more.
Optimisation.
When our teams migrate your content to the new site, we check all the metadata, update the SEO parameters, ensure all links work and there are no competing elements within the site, so that right from the start optimisation is already working for you.
Security.
A properly managed migration allows us to classify and archive information in logical, secure ways. We integrate data from an array of sources and migrate it to secure servers, protecting its integrity and at the same time streamlining the site’s operation.
