Treat your content like fresh produce
Often, content on the web is treated as though it’s a stash of tinned food in a nuclear bunker. This is especially true in public sector and enterprise settings.
It’s treated as something you acquire once, probably through a big shop (or a long tender process and one-off project) and can keep around for a good long while.
In fact, content has a shelf life, and it’s shorter than you think.
It goes stale. There’s lots of reasons for this, but the major ones are:
- the world moves on. In the public sector, this usually means that the law changes, new technologies become practical or new competitors enter a marketplace, so there are new, easier ways to meet a user need.
- rogue content. A colleague of mine coined this lovely phrase to describe content that exists outside an established end-to-end service. It’s the cruft of webpages that appear slowly due to one-off requests by stakeholders who need something online “right now” and can’t be persuaded into following a holistic, user-centred research process.
These two things together mean that your content quality and relevance tends to degrade steadily over time. So, treat it like you’d treat fresh fruits and vegetables on a supermarket shelf.
That means:
- don’t have more than you need. Putting more on the shelf than you need is unnecessary waste. “need” in this case refers to the users, not yourselves.
- have an infrastructure for regularly checking and replenishing it. That means teams with the skills and processes to make content design a part of ongoing work.
- have a robust customer service policy. Getting the public access to the services they need is the highest priority, even if it means they have to call up occasionally.
- bonus: buy local! Homegrown content made in close collaboration with the people who know it best — the people who operationally deliver a particular service, rather than central, disconnected digital people who are experts in design but not much else, tends to be much better.
Once you’re in this situation, it’ll be much easier to collaborate with the lawyers, business people and other non-digital people who would otherwise emerge from the mist every six months or so to demand you publish a new webpage that doesn’t fit, even slightly, with all of your wonderfully crafted user stories.
