Migrating Website Content: Dirty Little Secrets Every Marketer Should Know

Mark Sherbin, Content Marketing Specialist
Fred Salchli, Chief Technology Officer

You shouldn’t be forced to recreate your website’s content when you switch your CMS. Take a look at some tips for making the switch.

The time has come—a moment you’ve been dreading for over a year. You wipe the beads of sweat off of your forehead and try to steady your shaking hand. In a moment of desperation, you type the first thing that comes to mind in the search box: best CMS. Google crashes. Your computer shorts out. Overcome by sheer hysterics, you pass out and wake up an hour later in the fetal position, sucking your thumb.

It’s time to get a new CMS. You might have a few reasons for doing so, including but not limited to the following:

• Your CMS provider has gone out of business or has been acquired.
• You heard about new content management features you could use that your CMS doesn’t offer.
• You no longer have the budget to pay support & maintenance fees on your current CMS.
• You are multiple versions behind the most up-to-date version of your content management system.
• Your operating system or browsers are no longer supported.
• You’re ready to make the jump to open source software.

You’re not alone. The transition is frustrating.

Whatever the reason, one of the most difficult parts of switching to a new content management system is figuring out how to take your old content with you. In fact, it might seem so overwhelming that you’ll be tempted to recreate everything, either from scratch or based on the old content.

But that’s like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Content migration is easier than you might think—but that doesn’t mean it’s simple. Over the course of this paper, we’ll give you some background on content migration and answer the following questions.

• Why is it so difficult to migrate content?
• Why has content migration become increasingly important?
• What are the benefits of moving content from one platform to the next instead of recreating it?
• How does enterprise content migration work?
• How do we know content migration does what we say it does? (A case study)

Let’s put the roots of your frustration into perspective.

Why Migrating Website Content Presents a Challenge

If you’re looking to migrate content from a proprietary CMS to an open source alternative like Drupal, your content might be trapped behind bars, waiting for a great liberator to set it free. Finding the keys is a challenge that we can break down into ten specific areas of frustration.

10 Challenges in Content Migration

Why is content migration so difficult? Below are ten different challenges that enterprise migrations encounter on a regular basis.

1. You’re locked in.

As with any industry, competition among CMS vendors results in a difficult transition process. Your proprietary system may be configured in a way that makes it difficult to liberate your content—whether this is a result of the software vendor or the professional who set it up. You could have the best CMS on the market but if it’s configured poorly, it’s going to take a lot of work to get out.

2. Old content is set in its ways.

If you’ve been using the same CMS for several years, chances are you’ve had more than one hand directing additions and edits. From a developmental perspective, you may run into bad or inconsistent code.

3. Too many systems.

Enterprise websites often have so much content and have evolved over so many years that content and other data may be spread across more than one CMS. Consolidating your content management platforms into a single system can become a logistical nightmare.

4. Losing traction.

If you’ve made the decision to hang onto your content, your next question may be, “How do I retain the search engine presence this content has built for us over its lifetime?” Traction with Google and other engines is a high priority for marketers everywhere. Retaining that traction through indexed pages requires serious work on the part of the development team.

5. A copy-paste nightmare.

So you’ve decided to copy-paste your content into the new system to save money. If you have more than 200 pages of content, plan on locking yourself in your office for several months. Or save yourself the headache and keep reading this whitepaper.

6. Charting your territory.

Content isn’t limited to text, pictures and other media. What happens to the links you want to transfer over, especially the internal ones? Before you migrate your content, you have to map out everything, taking into consideration both the old and new architecture plans for your website.

7. Saving face…and format.

Whether you can take your content with you or not, large enterprise sites with multiple administrators usually means an inconsistency in formatting rules. The manual process of restoring formatting adds another complex layer to the migration.

8. Timing is everything.

If your site is pretty dynamic (read: you update content on a regular basis), what happens when you’re in transition mode? Will you spend time updating content on the old site while it’s still live AND the new site that hasn’t launched yet? Isn’t there an easier way?

9. Fickle browsing.

Because your site was built several years ago, the HTML might not work right with the most up-to-date browsers. Other persons of interest include table-based layouts, inline markups and no CSS. Don’t even get us started on mobile websites.

10. Getting analytical.

Because you’re physically challenging the structure of the site, you may have to restructure how you capture web analytics that are crucial to the online sales process.

Factors Driving the Importance of Content Migration

One fact should help you sleep at night: you are not alone. We’re writing about enterprise content migration because it’s a trend with marketers who recognize the asset value of their content, and more and more people are recognizing the risks to the performance of their sites.

Coupled with a stagnant economy, two major factors are driving more and more marketers to research successful strategies for content migration. Based on our experience at Duo, these trends have driven more and more marketers to seek our help in the content migration process.

Open Source is on the Rise

Unfamiliar with the open source revolution? Let’s take a look at what our good friend Wikipedia has to say about it:

“Open-source softwareis software whose source code is published and made available to the public, enabling anyone to copy, modify and redistribute the source code without paying royalties or fees.”

As a free software solution (usually with a community of developers and users to support it), open source platforms started to post higher adoption numbers during the recession. As a result, content migration becomes a priority for new open source site CMS adopters.

A 2009 study by Forrester Research put the use of open source software at the top of 16 items on the to-do list of 2,000 software decision makers. The next year, Accenture found over 69 percent of organizations anticipated an increased investment in open source software. In 2011, Gartner added more validation to the open source trend when a survey revealed more than half of the polled organizations had already implemented open source software.

What does a Microsoft SharePoint implementation (for instance) look like financially? Duo CTO Fred Salchli explains:

“Depending on a variety of factors, implementing SharePoint can cost between six and seven times the actual licensing cost. Licensing might run you around $100,000. Add another $600-700k on top of that for implementation. When you’ve factored in annual maintenance contracts, you’re talking about a gigantic chunk of change.”

In contrast, open source requires no licensing fee, (usually) a lower cost to implement and lower maintenance contracts. Because open source is for everyone, competition among consultancies drives implementation and maintenance prices down.

But, perhaps more importantly, open source solutions are usually built on a large community of developers who make constant contributions and bug fixes to the software. Support is rarely lacking—a fact that we think makes a pretty good case for open source.

Plenty of marketers agree or are just beginning to understand the benefits of open source. And the ones that are looking to make the move will need to undergo a content migration project.

Major CMS Industry Players are Consolidating

As a direct result of the open source revolution, a trend has developed in the CMS market over the last several years: more major CMS vendors are consolidating.

For instance: after acquiring Hummingbird (and therefore the popular RedDot CMS) in 2006, ECM provider OpenText purchased Vignette Corporation for around $310 million in 2009.

The acquisitions represent a continual concern for customers of third-party vendors touting proprietary technology: if the company fails or is acquired, how will the platform keep up with the industry? Oftentimes it simply won’t. In fact, RedDot’s product development will eventually be discontinued by OpenText. Then what?

Why Migrating Content Makes Sense for Your Organization

So far, we’ve demonstrated the challenges in content migration and the factors forcing you to choose a new CMS. Sure, the challenges seem overwhelming—but they’re not insurmountable.

Still thinking about recreating all of your site’s content? There’s tremendous value in your content—perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of value. Don’t give up yet. Consider the value of your content before you decide to trash the treasure found within.

Retaining the Search Presence You’ve Spent Years Building

Today’s marketer must be a machine to keep up with every online channel for marketing—and search engine optimization (SEO) is at the top of the priority list. If your organization is at the enterprise level, chances are you’ve been building your brand for years.

If you start from scratch recreating your old content and URLs, you’re going to lose the search presence your old site has been building for years.

There it is in black and white. Promoting your site’s search visibility is painstaking work. The gigantic amounts of content you’ve generated for the site, the amount of time Google has had to index pages on your site and the external SEO efforts you’ve spent plenty of time and money on are wiped out in seconds if you don’t migrate your content correctly.

What about inbound linking? You’ve spent time building up a presence with partner sites, blogs and other outlets. Where do those links go if your old pages are located at new and different addresses?

You may not have a full grasp of what you’ve spent on search traction because of all the factors involved, but you can bet the amount of money involved isn’t worth flushing down the drain. The solution? URL remapping.

Saving Precious Hours, Money and Resources

Any idea how much you’ll pay a professional copywriter to build all of the new content on your new website? Well, that depends on how many pages you have and how much content you need—but it could cost you anywhere from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Effective writing doesn’t come cheap.

Written content doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It’s going to require hours of interviews, outlining, structuring, slaving away at the word processor, review and revision. It’s going to tie up marketing resources for months—and if you’re building bios or other expert-based copy, you may have to hassle and pin down other resources, including C-level execs.

How Enterprise Content Migration Works

Now that you have everything in perspective, let’s outline the process, revisit the challenges and discuss how companies like Duo work to address them. While we don’t advocate tackling these challenges on your own (unless you’re working closely with a team of developers), the insights we’re including in this section will give you a better idea of the scope involved in a content migration project.

The Duo Process Put into Perspective

In our time designing and building enterprise websites, we’ve dealt with migrating content on a regular basis. It is common for our clients to underestimate the effort required to migrate content.

When you work with experienced consultants, the process is more efficient because we’re testing as we’re building.

Our process follows the ETL framework: Extract, Transform, Load.

EXTRACT

In this phase, the volume of data becomes somewhat of a nonissue. The bulk of the time in the extraction process revolves around identifying how your CMS stores and manages content and how it was specifically configured for your site. (For example, when you enter someone’s name, is it a single unit of content or are there “first” and “last” name fields?)  Once we understand how your CMS thinks, we go about the process of extracting the content.

Our experience certainly helps in this phase, but each project is its own unique animal.

TRANSFORM

The “transform” phase can get tricky. At this point in the process, we work to build relationships between similar types of content. The benefits of building out a “tagging” (or “taxonomy”) system are quicker, simpler navigation for visitors and uniform, intuitive content loading for site contributors.

Take for example your press release page. On your old site, you might have loaded content as a single blob. But there are three separate pieces of content that might help organize your site into a more searchable entity, greatly enhancing how your audience interacts with your site: “headline,” “date” and “body.” When we migrate content, we can upload that content in three pieces and create a rule for future press release uploads. The point is to aim for a consistent format throughout the site.

At this point, we also work to retain links sprinkled throughout your site. A lot of marketers are lax to think of links as “content”—but they’re a crucial part of how your site functions. Formatting is cleaned up, and content is made ready for loading.

LOAD

Now that your content is ready for the big time, we’re all set to get loading on the new site. We’ve already built out a URL map so visitors hitting pages from your old site won’t get an unfriendly “page not found” (404) error. Instead, the map redirects (301 redirect) visitors to the comparable new page. In the process, you retain your old search traction while increasing page quality with updated metatags, keywords and phrases.

Between Duo and the client, a plan is built out for the “load” phase that takes into account your unique situation and whether you want to update two sites simultaneously or whether we can plan around site updates.

Even if you’ve recognized the need for a content migration, it’s important not to go in blind. Our clients derive a lot of comfort from our experience planning out the entire course before undertaking a project as large as a content migration.

Here’s one for example.

How Scranton Gillette Got Its Groove Back: A Love StoryCase Study

When Scranton Gillette Communications acquired Building Design + Construction, Construction Equipmentand Housing Zone last year, they inherited a massive library of content that proved to be as much a headache as it was a step forward in the company’s game plan. The content would be a strong source of advertising revenue so time was of the essence.

Because of the way the data was organized, Duo received all of the content in the form of 35,000 XML files. Almost all of the content was tied to print versions of each of the publications. The team immediately set to work on the “extract” phase of the ETL framework.

Extract

The first step was to segregate the files by publication. The next level of segregation required organizing the files by issue. Finally, the team got down to the nitty-gritty and broke the files into “content type,” leveraging categories like “features,” “news,” “products” and “reviews.”

The final layer (and the true beginning of the extraction phase) meant breaking each content type into individual pieces of content. For instance, a feature article might be broken down into categories like “title,” “teaser,” “author,” “publication date” and “body.”

Because there were three separate publications stemming from separate websites and different taxonomies, there simply was no one-size-fits-all solution for Scranton Gillette. The Duo team made quick work of what should have been a painstaking process, launching into quality assurance (QA) testing to test assumptions about the structure. If a set of articles or issues were missing, for example, the QA was meant to find out why and to get the problem resolved.

Transform

In this phase of the process, the Duo team developed a new organizational “tagging” structure for the new site, segmenting out new content types by categories like “issue,” “author” and “taxonomy.” For each of the tags, the Duo team created a content type within Drupal, building the relationships that would ease searchability and the addition of future content.

As with the “extract” phase, the team launched into a QA testing verify relationships and identify “orphaned” pieces of content.

Load

Finally, the content was ready to populate the new site and the framework was ready to receive it. After the content was loaded into Drupal, the Duo team underwent another round of QA to test assumptions and verify relationships and aggregation.

The entire process, including general site design and development, was accomplished within a three-month span.

For the full story, visit the Scranton Gillette portfolio.

Conclusion

While we encourage you to migrate your content when you’re switching to a new CMS, we also believe that you’ll have a much happier, healthier experience if you have some direction from an experienced team of consultants. If you do decide to undertake the process on your own and have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact our CEO Michael Silverman at 312.529.3010 or msilverman [at] duoconsulting [dot] com.