Touchpoints During Content Migration: QA and Edit

Content migration isn't just a technical undertaking. For example, you will have staffing impacts. In particular, people will need to touch at least some of the content being migrated. Regardless of the quality of any content migration automation, someone will need to QA the most critical pages of your site to ensure unintended issues arose during the migration. Furthermore, you may want to editorially change some of your content to hone the messaging of your site if you are also restructuring the site.

Broadly speaking, these are the steps that involve someone to touch content during a migration: Sort -> Place -> Edit -> QA. Sorting content is the task at the beginning of content migration planning where the disposition of the content is determined, which hopefully is done by defining rules/patterns rather than looking individually at content. So at this point team members need to decide what gets dropped, archived, moved over without change, or edited (see the website migration handbook for ideas on making that determination). Hopefully in the same pass as sorting, you can determine where content will be placed on the new site. Again, ideally this is done with rules rather than a one-off basis.

Actual changes to the content occur at the Edit and QA stages. Since different resources need to do each, the distinction is important.

Edit

Editing is where you are substantively changing the content. In other words, regardless of any technical issues, how does the content need to change? Is the focus of the site changing, requiring a different angle or style? Editing requires either someone with a writing / editorial background or a subject matter expert. For instance, if your site is about photography, then you will need a photography subject matter expert to write the introduction to an entirely new section on the latest technology. Note also that editing could occur either in the existing system or the system you are moving to.

QA

If editing is what the subject matter expert or writer needs to do, actually QAing the content is what someone with more traditional webmaster skills does. The purpose of the QA process is to ensure that the technical migration was successful. In other words, this is more of an HTML/CSS flavor of issues that require web knowledge to both catch and fix. QAing can only occur on the new system. The types of issues here are:

• Special characters appearing unexpectedly
• Aspects of the new template "blown out" (where content, images, or tables extend beyond the area they are meant to be within)
• Strange wrapping of text (for instance in titles)
• Graphical elements from the old site that do not appear correctly in the new site
• Elements that have disappeared (it's useful to look at both side-by-side)
• Elements that were prominent in the old content that have lost their prominence (for instance headers)

See "Ensuring Quality During Site Migration" for more on the iterative aspect of QAing.

When defining your content migration plan, you can attempt to isolate what needs to be Edited and what needs to be QA'd. Then this information can be used to figure out the staffing impact so you can make intelligent decisions.