Gov1 sat down with Kathryn Crimmins, content manager of CityofBoston.gov, to talk about what it takes to move thousands of pages of city website content to a new design and content management system (CMS) that promises a better user experience.
On the city’s current website, you need to search by department to get your questions answered. But most people do not always know which department handles their issue du jour, and often their issue may span a few departments.
Working initially with design partner IDEO, the city’s digital team is developing topics to orient users through the content. For example, if you move to Massachusetts and receive an excise tax bill from the city of Boston, how do you know what it is? Related to that topic, where can you park as a city resident, and what else do you need to know about keeping a car in Boston? This topic area is specific to a user, but not specific to a single city department.
However, in the Web world, user experience is key to any website’s success--civic or otherwise. “We’re focusing on one user need and filling in the gaps across departments,” says Crimmins, who is performing qualitative content analyses for the city, department by department. What is creating the most excitement for the website are the one-on-one meetings. “People want to add a lot of new things. It will be great to see what the new system can do once we’re migrated,” says Kathryn.
The level of effort to migrate Boston’s 5,000 pages of content requires:
- 2-3 weeks for actual page migration to the new CMS
- 3-4 weeks of qualitative analyses
- 6 weeks to meet with 60 departments and review their content
- 8-10 weeks to copy edit and consolidate the existing content
The city is targeting May 30th to complete migration to the new CMS. What follows is a content migration Q&A designed to help local governments understand how to tactically approach website improvements.
EG: What are the first content migration questions a city facing a badly needed Web upgrade should ask about their troves of content?
KC: “The first question you should ask: ‘Where does it all live now?’ A crucial first step for Boston was conducting a content audit that included the full URL, owner, and last updated date of every webpage on our site. For us, that was over 5,000 pages.
Having an exhaustive list of our webpages allowed us to ask more refined questions like, ‘When was this last visited?,’ and, ‘Is this relevant to our work?’”
EG: How is content migration being approached for Boston.gov? Will everything carry over, or is there a process to select the best or most relevant content?
KC: “We began our content migration with a qualitative analysis of every page on our website. The key question we asked is, ‘Is this relevant to the owning department’s mission and goals?’ Anything with a ‘no’ answer is marked not to move onto the redesigned website.
Other key questions we asked were:
- ‘Can this information be consolidated?’
- ‘Is this still being updated?’
- ‘Is this the most useful format for this content?’”
EG: Which technical tools are making content migration possible, or easier?
KC: “Boston is a Google city, and we rely heavily on Google sheets and docs to get our work done. The collaborative nature of Google docs is especially useful during our copy editing phase. Often, our plain writing expert is writing and editing alongside our subject matter expert (the department) in a Google doc.
Visuals have also been a crucial part of our communications with departments. We use a clickable prototype made with InVision to demonstrate how the finished boston.gov will look and feel for users. This has been highly useful to explain changes in our navigation and content to power users of our current website.”
EG: Do you have any content migration advice for cities, towns, and counties that have the need to upgrade, but not necessarily the dedicated resources that the city of Boston has?
KC: “Just get started! It might seem like an overwhelming task, but if you break it up into small pieces, it’s a manageable, highly-useful exercise. Start with a subject matter expert with a small amount of content and ask questions like, ‘How does this content support your mission and goals? How does it not?’ As you learn how to have this conversation, you can start expanding it to other departments and before you know it, you’ll be halfway through a content audit.
Boston is not only redesigning its website; we are redesigning the business processes that operate the website. For content, this means building in recurring reviews to answer the same questions we asked at the beginning of our content migration. I would tell other government agencies to begin integrating scheduled reviews into their work so that a content audit is something that is always happening, versus one large project conducted every few years.”
Crowdsourcing Feedback
Working with Acquia, the city chose an agile development process. A pilot website provides residents and stakeholders a look into the future. Content is posted as it is vetted in order to test the topics and see how users are finding the content they need. The initial cost for the entire project, which includes development of the city’s new Intranet, is $900K. Annual hosting with Acquia costs about $175K, according to the city. However, the crowdsourcing campaign is free, and worth the effort, says Kathryn. From January 7th through March 3rd, the city received more than 2,000 pieces of individual feedback in various languages.
