Crafting quality content throughout its lifecycle

Digital content is like a puppy.

You must care for it, feed it, and meet its needs at various points in its life. If you think publishing content is the end, think again. You’ve only just gotten the puppy. Now you need to support it and give it a good life. Best practices for excellent content include establishing processes to maintain quality and accuracy, setting up a governance structure, and standing up a content team.

Content maintenance

The first step is to look through your legacy content. Just because something was published online does not mean that it must stay there forever. Strategies to keep your content fresh include:

• Web analytics: Use analytics tools to track the views that a page gets. If a page is receiving little to no views, it might be ready to retire.
• Content audits: Complete a thorough audit of the content on your site to help decide when to retire, consolidate, or update content that is accessed frequently.

Unmanaged content is a liability. Content standards ensure that your digital presence remains relevant and reliable.

Be sure to carefully examine all content eligible for publishing. Sometimes, less is more. Ask yourself:

• Do you really need this content online?
• How long will it stay relevant?
• What kind of maintenance will it need?
• How difficult will it be to make your content accessible?
• Do the answers to these questions justify the effort?

Continually assess your digital presence and make sure your content is the right size for your audience’s needs. This is also a good time to update the accessibility of your older, still relevant content, in accordance with the requirements for delivering a digital-first public experience.

Evaluate the media platforms used by your agency. Ask questions like:

• Where does your content currently reside?
• Are people getting the content they expect, where they expect to see it? For example, are you making your videos available where people expect to see videos?
• How do people prefer to receive their content?

Align your content’s tone, style, and writing with the expectations your users bring to a certain platform. For example, your social media posts may be more casual than the information on your official website. Additionally, consider your audience’s knowledge of a subject and design your digital content with empathy. Creating user types or personas is an excellent strategy for better understanding how your audience might approach or first encounter your digital content.

Content governance

As you go through the lifecycle of creating, maintaining, updating, and removing content, a governance strategy is key to success. Governance strategies will help you determine the right metrics to evaluate your digital content’s impact on your audience, and help you maintain content by assigning ownership. Effective governance strategies allow content managers to:

• Handle sensitive content that needs legal or accessibility review
• Verify content with subject matter experts (SMEs) across your agency
• Understand when and how to seek formal approvals and from whom

Integrating governance into your content management processes builds overall organizational investment in creating and maintaining quality digital content.

Content governance may look different at your agency depending on how digital teams and functions are organized. GSA’s digital governance framework provides an example of how to manage and improve digital services in government.

Creating small and scrappy teams

Governance strategies are particularly empowering for small teams, especially for organizations that don’t have formal content management structures in place. Adopting a governance strategy can empower small teams to use their limited resources efficiently by setting up formal roles and responsibilities. Small teams can establish an agile publishing process to focus on smaller segments of content, such as releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) first, and gradually including enhancements and updates over time. Success could even look like decommissioning old content and focusing on slowly and measurably adding new content that meets a high standard.

Throughout this process, believe in and leverage your employees, and empower their career trajectories. This inspires creativity and alignment with the agency’s mission and goals.

What can I do next?

Quality content depends on continuously assessing your site content and digital presence process, and establishing a governance structure that keeps your team on track to achieve its goals.

Explore an introduction to structured content to learn more about how to treat your content like data and transform how your users find, understand, share, use, and reuse government information.

You can also join the Digital.gov web managers community of practice to learn more about how other government web practitioners implement governance strategies to manage content.