A common question in my web writing workshops is ‘how do we stop people publishing content we know no one will ever use?’
Poor publishing strategy in the public sector
Many of my clients are public sector organisations. Most use content management systems and have staff from all over the organisation producing content. Publishing decisions are decentralised and there are rarely any strategic efforts to guide this activity. So publishing goes on relatively unconstrained.
These websites are often enormous. Many have two or three times as many PDF documents as there are web pages. Some are chock full of reports and assorted documents. Hundreds, or even thousands of them. Many are years and years old. Often, they’re rarely read. Other sites have a copy of every brochure the organisation has produced in the last few years. Many brochures refer readers to ‘more information online’ when they’re already online and all they can find is the brochure they’ve just read.
In some cases, particularly universities, content is duplicated. Sometimes there are different versions of the same information. A prospective student once told me about finding three different versions of course information on a university website and getting a fourth version when she called them to clarify the situation. She said she enrolled somewhere else as a result.
Reasons for publishing that need to be challenged
Over the years I’ve heard all sorts of reasons for publishing content online.
- It doesn’t cost us anything, so let’s put it online
- Someone might find it useful
- If anyone ever calls about it, we can tell them where to download it
- We don’t have much content on our part of the website, so lets put some of this stuff up
- We’ll be able to find it again if we put it on our section of the intranet
- If we just link to it, then we’ll have to keep checking that the link still works
- It’s not our core business, but we get telephone enquiries about it
- It’s one of the things we offer advice on, even if it’s not our core business (and despite having another part of the site dedicated to it)
- I spent a lot of time writing this, and I want it to go online
How many of these sound familiar to you? More often than not, these sorts of motivations should be questioned.
How to avoid publishing low value content
You can’t do it on your own
Most people who raise this problem with me try to deal with it on their own. They try to explain to the would-be publisher why it’s not a good idea to publish information that no one is likely to want. They try to explain that the website is not a filing cabinet, that the more you put on it, the harder it becomes to organise and find things. They plead, cajole and sometimes get frustrated and angry. Sometimes it works. But a lot of the time it doesn’t. It’s tiring and will eventually wear you out.
Coordination is needed
Instead, organisations need a coordinated approach. A web publishing strategy or policy needs to guide decisions on when to publish and when not to. It needs to apply to every part of the organisation. Someone senior needs to support and champion this approach, and make sure it doesn’t get watered down over time.
There should be a publishing process that starts with asking questions about the business and end user benefits of publishing a piece of content. If you wanted to do a print run of brochures, you’d have to make a business case for it. The same should apply to web content.
How to get started
Different things will work in different organisations. Here are some key things to try.
Gather evidence
You could do a content audit and show how much content there is (often a shock in itself) and how much of it is under-used. You can get free tools to crawl your site and generate a list of pages. And you’ll need to get hold of your website usage statistics. Be careful that you’re not just highlighting old content. That’s a different problem that happens at the other end of the content lifecycle — lack of maintenance, removal and archiving of content.
Or you could start documenting poor publishing decisions and following them up by checking on usage statistics for that content.
Find a champion
If you have a web team, talk to them. Maybe they can help you push this agenda. If you have an online communications team, approach them.
Whoever you talk to it will be important to find someone senior in the organisation who cares about your website and can help you make the case for reigning in poor publishing decisions. You need someone articulate, someone with clout in the organisation and someone with stamina. Changing an organisation’s culture (which is what is really needed) takes time and persistence.
Get it included in an existing project
Are there any web or communications projects happening in your organisation? Are you doing a policy or style guide review? Is a new content management system being rolled out or are you making changes to the existing one? You might get some attention for this problem by raising it in the context of an existing project.
