Moving to a new CMS

If you're planning the migration of a website to a new CMS, ActiveStandards should be at the centre of your project management programme.

Your organisation may be migrating formerly independent websites into an enterprise-wide CMS; moving from one ECMS to another, or just to a significantly upgraded version. For some organisations, this is an ideal opportunity to relaunch with a new website look and feel. For others the focus is on making the technical change, in this case, they may be reproducing existing templates within a new infrastructure.

Whatever your drivers, the migration of large quantities of content represents a complicated governance challenge:

• How do keep control of the migration process, and ensure that the right content is migrated to the right areas of your new site, with the correct templates and styles applied?
• How do you communicate new template requirements (and any changes to your standards and policies) to your website editors and ensure they're understood?
• How do you make sure that your finished site is fully compliant and ready to go?

ActiveStandards provides total visibility of the migration process - eliminating error,  and ensuring your new site goes live on time, on budget and fully compliant with your brand and website standards.

Common challenges and requirements:

• Existing websites need to be audited and selected content migrated into the new templates
• Any pre-existing compliance issues on the old site need to be identified to ensure they are not copied over when content is migrated to the new website templates
• Newly created sites need to be centrally reviewed and signed off before being published into the live environment
• Editors require training and guidance in your new website policies and the use of the new templates
• In addition, managers often need to oversee two websites in parallel - the live site and the new site - doubling the quality assurance challenge

ActiveStandards will help you:

• Monitor the compliance of your existing site to ensure your brand and reputation aren't damaged as your focus shifts to your new CMS
• Easily manage pre-launch QA of your new site, by supervising development in the staging environment. ActiveStandards will enable you to seamlessly QA any iterations in your CMS implementation as they occur, providing significant time savings and eliminating error.
• Verify whether migrated content is at expected levels
• Capture issues caused by migrating content, and easily detect and remove any legacy content such as old products, logos and references to people that have left the company
• Ensure any new content created for the website meets your policies
• Communicate and reinforce new template requirements (and new policies) to website editors, and enable them to prioritise their pre-launch workload
• Set unambiguous targets for site sign-off
• Check link integrity as the site is launched into the production environment
• Check tracker scripts are correctly applied

 

When launching a new set of website templates you will need to provide your editors with practical documentation on how to use them. This is also a good time to review your standards on issues like accessibility, SEO, and copywriting, to support your editor training programme and provide a shared understanding of best practice.

Our website standards experts can help you define and document your web standards and policies.