[CMS] Content migration: options and strategies

[Brendan Quinn]

Seeing as it's all the old guard chiming in on this post, I thought I'd
join in too...

James, I actually disagree somewhat with your very first point! ("There
is no way to avoid migrating content in a redesign")

Having the luxury of working on mostly time-based sites such as news and
broadcast-related sites, there is a strong argument for not migrating
content at all, and leaving the old (statically published "flat files")
sitting on the disk, in their old "page furniture".

There is a kind of historical value in having URLs like
http://www.bbc.co.uk/election97/frameset.htm still available, and I can
tell you, if our only choices were migrating all of that content to a
new CMS and republishing, or turning it off, then we couldn't have
justified the cost and would have had to flick the switch. Having the
opportunity to just leave the content there meant that we didn't have to
close it off or leave it for the Wayback Machine to handle.

Similarly, as we redesigned the site over time, we mostly left the
designs as they were...

1997: http://www.bbc.co.uk/politics97/diana/
2002: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/review/2159682.stm
2006: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6176769.stm
2008: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7328754.stm

The page design gives users a sense of context that they can use to
recognise that the site has moved on.

Although I guess this is more about a design issue than a content
management one.

So if you want to avoid migration hell, come work on a
statically-published news site! (Having said all that, when we redesign
non-news sites, we still have an awful lot of migration to do...)

It's just like old times, eh?

Brendan :-)

-----Original Message-----
From: cms-bounces at lists.cms-forum.org
[mailto:cms-bounces at lists.cms-forum.org] On Behalf Of James Robertson
Sent: 21 July 2008 18:26
To: cms at lists.cms-forum.org
Subject: [CMS] Content migration: options and strategies

Hi all,

I've just published an article on the options for migrating content when
redesigning a website or intranet:

http://www.steptwo.com.au/papers/kmc_migration/index.html

Would be interested to hear everyone's thoughts...

Cheers,
James

--
-------------------------
James Robertson, Managing Director
Step Two Designs

Email: jamesr at steptwo.com.au
Web: www.steptwo.com.au
Phone: +61 2 9319 7901

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