Content lifecycle
Assess
Learn everything you can about the current content landscape:
- Content inventory
- Content audit
- User needs and expectations
- Organization goals
- Organization capacity for content creation and maintenance
- Stakeholder and user interviews
Determine who your key stakeholders are, and what roles they will play with the content:
- Content owner
- Subject matter expert
- Contributor
- Reviser
- Maintainer/Assessor
- Signoff power
Determine what success looks like. Formulate a plan to track progress against specific measurable goals ideally tied to your organization's goals, including:
- Web traffic analytics
- Conversions
- Signups
- Customer service volume
Create
Perform exercises and/or workshops to gather ideas and gain consensus about how to structure content.
Prepare draft/mockup content:
- Revise, restructure, and/or rewrite current content
- Write new content
- Create mockup on development platform
Revise
Gather feedback from stakeholders and make changes:
- Content owner/subject matter expert
- Legal reviewer
- Spelling and grammar proofreader
- Voice and tone reviewer
- Web principles and guidelines reviewer
- Signoff reviewer
Perform testing and quality assurance:
- Usability testing
Launch
Bring your mockup to life:
- Remove old content from live server
- Put new content on the live server
- Adjust A to Z listings
- Ensure content is being indexed properly by search engines
Announce your new content to the world with a communications plan.
Maintain
Develop and execute a maintenance plan for each piece of content:
- Determine who is responsible and accountable
- Determine how often it should be reviewed
- Determine next date for review
- Remove content at expiration date, and delete or archive it
Accommodate for ongoing assessment:
- Continue to measure progress against stated goals
- Make adjustments as necessary
The MnDOT Office of Communications can provide help through all five phases of the content lifecycle.