Historically, web content management and records management have been at two different ends of the content management spectrum: web was all about time-to-market while records were about defining what you could get away with deleting. As web has increasingly become a channel for storing and sharing business-critical content (both within and beyond the firewall), you need to consider how long you can afford to hold onto your web content for.
Typically, retention policies are based on regulatory requirements, but it’s also a matter of reducing clutter. Most information we have at our disposal is useless: getting rid of it is going to help you get to useful content far more quickly.
So how do you sift wheat from chaff and decide what should stay and what should go? You have a number of options:
1. Stock-take
Spider your website every six months to get the last updated date for every page. Assign someone to go through every page that’s over six months old and decide if it’s valuable. If it is, update its last updated date; if not, remove it.
Pros: simple to implement.
Cons: a time-consuming and pretty blunt instrument.
2. Rolling assessments
Slightly more effective than a six-monthly stock take is a rolling approach, which you can do by setting a workflow status in your CMS to alert you to review each piece of content six months after its been published. The review cycle is therefore becomes business as usual rather than an arduous project.
Pros: spreads the workload, covers content that isn’t spider-able (such as reserved, non-public content).
Cons: still treats all content as equal, irrespective of its real value.
3. Pre-classification
Use either of the above methods in combination with metadata attached to the content. When you first publish your content, classify it as strategic or tactical. You can also add classifications for legal purposes (such as content covered under the data protection act). The different classifications then attract different review cycles: you review strategic content every year but tactical content after 6 weeks. You can add as many classifications as suit your needs and tie them to content types automatically within the CMS; for example, research publications are always strategic while press releases are always tactical. You can also automate the removal of these pieces of content using the CMS workflow.
Pros: flexible, extendable approach to retention; simple to implement with editorial guidance.
Cons: you’ll probably need to do an initial stock take of your existing content in order to perform the initial classification.
You still need to decide how you archive your web content: do you simply delete a page completely, or do you archive off a section of the site to a flat-file copy so that you can refer to it if necessary?
Whether you archive or delete, removal of useless content is an essential activity for all large website owners. Implementing a web content retention policy will bring real benefits to your organisation beyond the world of compliance. Less clutter brings easier content management, simpler information architecture and better access to relevant information for your user base. It’s an essential de-tox, so get deleting!
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