 I think it's time to start. Thanks, everyone, for coming. So we have a presentation today about content governance models. And I'm excited to share something with you a little bit beyond Drupal, more in the realm of content and marketing. And we don't always have a lot of this content at DrupalCon, so it's great to have all the people interested in that in the room. For those of you who haven't met me, my name is Suzanne Dargacheva. I'm the one walking around sometimes with the baby who I brought to DrupalCon this year, such an adventure. If you want to stay in touch, there's my email address there. And I'm Pixelite on Drupal Slack. If you're on Drupal Slack, you can always reach out. My role in Drupal, I'm co-founder of Evolving Web, an agency that's very dedicated to Drupal. It's near and dear to our hearts. And I'm also the initiative lead of the Promote Drupal Initiative. So if you're interested in marketing for Drupal and just doing a better job of spreading the word about Drupal beyond this Drupal sphere we're in this week, I would love to chat with you about that. I know there's some marketing content people in the room who might be interested. So at Evolving Web, we get to work with all kinds of organizations that are kind of in different phases of their digital journey. And sometimes at the beginning of a project, we're trying to see, OK, well, what are the needs here? Are we trying to improve the content? Is it just a standard website redesign? Are we trying to do something bigger, more strategic? And I see some telltale signs sometimes that there's some need for content governance or love on a project. So if you are working on a project that falls into one of these categories, it's a good sign that maybe there's some frustration there. Maybe there's some need. First thing that I see sometimes is that the website doesn't outlast the marketing team. We raise the question, why are we doing this redesign? Or why are we rethinking the content here? And the answer is, oh, yeah, we have a new marketing director. I'm sure some of you have been there. New marketing director, let's redo everything. But these days, often, marketing teams don't stick around a long time, just the reality of the job market. And so when you see that the website's not lasting so long because of turnover, that can be a sign that there's some governance issues at play. Another thing we see is that there is redesigns constantly. So even though the website kind of looks fresh, it doesn't actually correspond to the content needs. There's problems with user experience. There's problems with different parts of the organization not being well represented on the site. Like, oh, we did a redesign three years ago, but we completely forgot about this one type of user. Or we forgot to ask HR what they needed from the website. So that can happen. And then sometimes we get use cases where the content doesn't improve over time. And sometimes, of course, it gets worse. So these things you see happening on your project, it's probably a sign that you need to maybe do things a little bit differently. And maybe that's why you find yourself here today to look for some new ideas. And one recommendation I can give right off the bat, probably, to everyone is to rethink how your typical process goes for running a web project. So if we think of how do projects usually go? Usually we have some kind of discovery at the beginning. We have a design. We do implementation. Then we are doing ongoing maintenance. And so in terms of content and governance kind of tasks, we often start with a discovery that just does we do general workshops. We ask what are the needs of this website. We go on. We figure out a content strategy based on that. But governance planning often comes a bit later in the process. So some of you might be thinking, oh yeah, that happened to us. You don't actually ask questions about who are going to be the authors and editors of content. Who's going to own this content? You're not maybe asking those types of questions at the outset. Maybe you're doing that after the site has been built. And you're thinking more about those types of things when the time comes to actually create roles and permissions in Drupal. Instead of talking about it at the outset of the project when you're asking questions about content strategy in general. And so my first recommendation is to just move the governance planning for your project earlier. And so what does that mean? It means that when you're looking for, when you're running workshops about user experience, often we're doing user journey mapping type of workshops, you're also asking questions about, well, who's going to be working on all this content that we're talking about? There's all these content opportunities we're coming up with, all these new ideas. But who's actually going to be responsible for that? Those types of questions often should come earlier in the process. And the types of things we can do in content governance discovery is really asking two types of questions. First of all, talking about what kind of content your organization is already producing. So it's great to talk about opportunities for new content. I know I always love to come in and say, oh, the one thing, the one trick that you need is just add this one new type of content and your site is going to perform 10 times better. But that tends to take a whole lot of work to create that one special kind of content. And sometimes you're already producing more content than you think. So depending on the type of organization you have, you can ask about things like, are you already doing journalism through your organization? Are there any people out there interviewing maybe internal people or external people? Are they creating content? Or is content being created for social media purposes? Is there internal communications? Like you have an intranet that's actually creating really good quality content that's never exposed to the world. So asking those types of exploratory questions about what kind of content you're already creating is a good way to expand your discovery and see, are there opportunities there for reuse? And then also asking the types of questions about what content do we need more of, like content that serves the mission of your organization or content that creates a better user experience. So these are, of course, questions you can ask in the discovery process. And I'll be providing some more tips throughout the presentation about how to improve that discovery. But just in general, doing that type of thing earlier on is going to probably help you. And one of the things you can figure out in discovery is just generally, what kind of content strategy are you using in general for your project? And so I organize this presentation into three apps, three websites, three stories, three types of sites. So you might find you have a marketing brochure for a website. You might ask, why would somebody use Drupal? We're all here using Drupal. Why would you use Drupal in 2023 for a marketing brochure website? And I have a couple good answers. One, you might be using Drupal for a marketing brochure website if you have 1,000 websites. It's easy to just spin up a Squarespace site or use some other tool if you just have a single marketing brochure. But if you've got many of them, Drupal's going to be maybe a good use case. You might also find yourself having a website that's more targeted towards the generation. And I know that something a lot of people are trying to do there, talking about using Drupal for SEO purposes and trying to pull more users into their site. And then I think something that a lot of us are using Drupal for is for informative sites, institutional websites. And I see head nodding, because I think a lot of those people come to DrupalCon. We see a lot of universities here, a lot of libraries, government organizations. And you really have websites that have more of a goal to inform than to try to convert. And so this is a third type of content strategy we often see with Drupal. And so you might have a project where your website falls into one of these three nice, clean categories. Or you might be saying, well, Suzanne, actually my website is all of those things. So that might be some of you hands up here if you're like, oh yeah, my website has to do everything. Everything, every checkbox, my website's got to do it all. So you might also have that situation, in which case good thing for you. All the advice in this presentation applies to you. So you can know napping for you. You've got to listen to the whole thing. And so I think it's nice to think that every website is its own special butterfly and has its own special content governance and content strategy just that applies to it. But I think that we can generalize a little bit. So it might be useful for you to think about which bucket your project falls into or which bucket. So we'll start with the story of the marketing brochure. So a marketing brochure is, I'd like to kind of differentiate it from other types of projects because a marketing brochure is usually something you leave lying around. Maybe you take it door to door, but you often leave it lying around. And for somebody to pick up the marketing brochure, maybe they already have to know about your organization. You already have some kind of reputation you're leaning on. And so the goal of the website from a content strategy perspective is often to build that reputation in the digital space. So it's kind of a digital front door, digital calling card, a way to create a reputation or build on a reputation. And sometimes it's a way to retell the story of an organization because you might have a reputation that's a bit outdated. And your website might be the place where you want to push your new brand and you want to push forward your new digital identity. And so the goal of your content strategy should be about tailoring your message for each audience that you have and really pushing forward the goals of your organization. So the story I want to tell is about a project I worked on for Queens University. So this is an organization that, like many of you, might have, you know, they have many Drupal websites, including a home site, which is what they call their main site, the site you'd go to if you went to queensu.ca. And it has, this one website has a really important role of being this place where people come to when they're researching the university. So it's their home page. And that being said, it's not the website that's supposed to have all the information you'd ever need about the university. If you're studying there, if you're researching there, if you are going to do some partnership with Queens, there's probably five other websites you need to go to. This website is meant to be more of the home page, the more of the reputation building place that we would expect a brochure, the role that we would expect a brochure to fill. And so when we look at a website like this, you might think, well, what makes a marketing brochure site the way it is? And how can I tell if I have this type of site, or if a marketing brochure is part of the identity of the website that I'm running? So I find projects like this. We always hear the same thing. The project starts. We hear the list of feedback we've gotten about this website. And the number one thing at the top of the list is content heavy pages. We're trying to squeeze too much content into a project because the goal is maybe not so much to inform as to just create a first impression. So digital or marketing brochure websites are there to create this first impression and improve on the first impression. So with this university, part of the goal was to really take the reputation that the university had, which was a really positive one, and just make it better, transform it into the modern view that they have of themselves. So that being said, the redesign, a goal is to push the brand forward. And there's a desire from the content team to create more visual content and more messaging-oriented content. And what you see here is that in signs that you have this type of website, we have feedback coming from end users, like the content is really heavy, but also feedback coming from the content team, like the content team telling us we want to create more content that's visual. We want to create content that tells our story that has a more focus on the brand and the actual messaging framework. And so when we think about what that means in terms of how we implement the site in Drupal, I think there's some common takeaways that we have for sites like this. So sites that are marketing brochures, they might seem very simple because they only have five pages. Arguably, the website has a lot more than five pages, but at a glance, there's not a lot of pages of content. We're not dealing with hundreds of thousands of nodes, but the content that we do have pulls a lot of weight. And so we have a desire to create content that's really meaningful and really sticks well to the brand. And with an organization like this, you might be in a similar situation where you don't have one website, you have 1,000 sites, you have even 100 sites or 12 sites. And in any of these cases, you want some consistency from site to site. You probably have seen other sessions today and tomorrow about site standardization, how to create websites that are more standardized. And so your content strategy also kind of needs to have that in mind. So often a project like this, this is the home site and this will probably set the standard for other websites at the organization, at the institution. Okay, the home site or the main website is doing things like this. It's creating banners like this. It's creating lists of content like that. And you wanna create reusability into the system so that when you're building those other sites, you have a common language you're speaking. So that being said, building a reusable component library. So that can mean two things in Drupal, right? We have components, when we talk about components, we can talk about the building blocks. So components could be things like paragraphs. You wanna have paragraph types that are the same from site to site. But it could also mean the individual pieces of content. So I create this amazing banner that has this really aspirational message solving the world's greatest challenges. Maybe my other websites could benefit from the same message and the same image. So reusable content, a reusable component library could mean reusing the building blocks or reusing the blocks themselves. So that's a, with any marketing brochure, you should be asking that question. Do we wanna reuse the blocks or do we wanna reuse the building blocks, like the building blocks, like the templates? I think there's also a real really good practice of having governance over the individual components, not just the pages. People often think about content governance like, okay, we have to have instructions for people on how to create a page and how to create an event. But these days we often think more about websites in terms of the components, like the banner up top there. How do I create that? And why do I create that? So the documentation for a marketing brochure website, even if it's a simple five page site, it should have some guidance for content creators about how, or why they should pick one component over the other and what kind of purpose each one should have. It shouldn't just be about Drupal how to create a page and how to add paragraphs to the page or how to use Layout Builder to create the homepage. It should also be about the content itself and why you would combine different elements on a page. If I look at this page here in the screenshot, for those of you who can't see it, the top is really a saturated image, then there's this section with a white background and then there's a section with a blue background. Seems simple enough, but for a content editor they might not think to create content with that visual balance of like a saturated thing, a light thing, and then saturated thing. And so building that into the documentation and having some governance over the way components are used is gonna be a good strategy for a site like this. This morning in the Dries note, we heard some interesting things about innovative features that could be added to Drupal and we heard all about a decoupled Layout Builder solution. I think this would be really cool for this type of site for having an improved content editing interface for something like Layout Builder because the visual content editing interfaces and drag and drop ones where you can preview content are really exciting for sites like this and something that editors of these sites are really gonna value a lot. And then just a couple extra considerations for multi-sites. So if you're managing, again, not just one site, but many, I think good questions to ask in discovery and good things to think about in the Drupal implementation aren't, it's not just about the roles and permissions on your site, but it's the roles and permissions across sites. So figuring out how that should work at your organization and not just kind of ignoring that potential problems of people having different types of permissions and different types of sites. And then the final thing that you might consider is having a dam, so digital asset management. It's probably overkill for one marketing brochure website, but if you're going to be rolling out a whole series of sites, one huge problem that I see editors have on sites like this is just figuring out, well, what kind of imagery should I use and what version of my logo should I use or what kind of phrasing can I use here or there? What version of this PDF is available? Even for something like a university, which you don't always think of as being really like a marketing organization, they might really be relying on a few key PDFs, like a view book to convince potential students to go to the school. And so having a consistent document that's used as here's our view book, download it. A dam is gonna make that easier for reusing those types of assets across sites. And I think it's something that's a bit undervalued. People might think, oh, we don't need that. We're an institution. We're not like a huge corporation. Why do we need a dam? But I think there could be a lot of value. And of course with Drupal, you can create a dam that's very simple because we already have a media library built in or you can create one that's more customized and much more featureful. Okay, second type of site. And I'm curious how many of you, how many of you do lead generation or have lead generation concerns as part of your website? A few of you? Yeah, it might be a little bit less common for Drupal sites or I would say maybe a bit less common for folks coming to DrupalCon to have to do lead generation. But sometimes it's required even for one role that your site plays. Maybe lead generation isn't the primary goal. Maybe you're more relying again on users that already know you based on reputation. But you might for certain parts of your site be trying to reach out to new audiences. So lead generation mandates often have more focus on an SEO strategy, more focus on assessing how content performs on social media and getting content to where users are. And I think in this case, governance really plays this role of giving authors insight into how that content performs and having this constant feedback loop of how is the content doing, how do we need to adjust the content? And that has to go more quickly because you're creating more content with a lead generation machine. So an example of this, if you, so I'm from Montreal, which is in Quebec, which isn't too far from here, it's a fun place to go. If you've never been to Quebec or heard of it or thought of going there, you can go to this website, bonjourcobac.com. It's a Drupal site. And you can check it out. It's fun like just looking at nice pictures of beautiful outdoor places. And the team that works on this project, they are, there's people who run hotels and restaurants and things that have listings on the website, but there's also a lot of people who work in government who are trying to attract tourism. So they're trying to create more content that will get the tourists to come. So if I Google dog sledding, which is something people do in Quebec, dog sledding near Montreal, I should find some of their content pop up and I should be able to find some place to go dog sledding nearby or some related activities. And so this is lead generation, right? We're trying to attract more traffic through selected content on the site. And so you might have this type of site. If you have this focus on certain keywords that are more competitive, what's the niche that I'm trying to appeal to? What are people Googling that I really want to attract audiences around? And what am I doing that's different than everybody else? I mean, you can go dog sledding in Quebec and that doesn't apply to too many places in North America. So maybe that's a good competitive keyword for me. But if you're a university, it might be something more like a special program that you have or certain types of study arrangements that you have. You might have that awareness of keywords that people are using. And if these are the types of conversations that you're having, then you are doing lead generation or you're trying to. And so other signs, when you're trying to bring content to new audiences, so if you're having a larger kind of discovery conversation about content strategy, content governance, you might be asking about, well, what does this website need to do that it didn't need to do five years ago? And so maybe there is some lead generation activity that you're trying to do that didn't need to happen before because you are trying to expand into a new market, new sector, you're trying to get more eyes on pages. And then another thing could be just trying to reuse content from other channels, increased content production. Often these are things that are aligned with a strategy around lead generation. So if you have this type of site, what should you be focusing on in Drupal? I think one thing that takes a lot of time that people often underestimate the time for is the amount of work it takes to integrate tracking in your, like Google Analytics tracking or tracking using whatever analytics tool you're using and the tracking in other channels, right? If you're using your website but you also have a CRM and you also have Eventbrite and you also have some kind of newsletter tool and then you're trying to see how people funnel from your site into these other platforms that can take a lot of work and people tend to underestimate that work and underestimate the need for people creating content to have visibility into all of that. So visibility on SEO success at the content level means I'm a person adding content to the site. I wanna be able to look at some of the content I create and see actually how did it perform. And sometimes that takes a whole lot of work behind the scenes. It could be something as simple as just making sure that your URLs are well-formatted so that people can actually understand in the analytics tool what they're looking at. It could be a matter of just your keyword hygiene or your metatag hygiene. It could also be that what your content editors really need on a site like this is a clean taxonomy that really serves the content editors. So I think one thing that people under appreciate or undervalue in Drupal is the amount of benefit that content editors can get from having a good interface for working on their content. And what does that mean, a good interface? Well, it means they can find the content that they're trying to assess or that they're trying to edit or that this content even exists already on our own site. So if you think about the Drupal admin UI you think about the content overview page. It's a very limited page. It just has a list of all the content and then a few filters at the top. But this is so easy to customize. So if you do have a site that is meant to do lead generation and it has content editors who you want them to know more about the content that already exists on the site you should be spending at least 100 hours on your project figuring out well what kind of dashboards do these people need and are there taxonomies we can create just for them so that they can find their own content. And it's really worth that investment in time if it means that those people are gonna be able to improve the content over time. Remember back to the first slide, if your content's not improving over time you want to pinpoint why. So 100 hours maybe that sounds like a lot to you maybe it sounds like nothing to you but I'm just throwing out a number to get you thinking about that investment in time and how it can help the people managing your content. And I think it's especially valuable if you have people leaving. So the reality of content writers is that maybe they don't stick around at your organization longer than a couple years, right? You might have the whole churn due to the great resignation and you're thinking like okay we have people who don't know our organization as well as they could and creating good dashboards and good taxonomies around your own content can help onboard new people a lot faster. And then finally no code integration with your CRM. I think no code there should probably be hyphenated. So being able to integrate with your CRM without the person creating a landing page having to write code. So that means if you wanna create a landing page where people can sign up for something or take some action or add a CTA they don't have to write code to do that. So if you're trying to integrate with your site with Salesforce or HubSpot, the people doing that integration as they're adding new content shouldn't have to write code every time they should just be able to do that through configuration and do it through the admin UI. Okay so that leads us to the third type of site which I think many of you have. So how many of you have websites that are meant to inform people? Yeah, you guys are doing the good work of informing the world, guys and girls and all of you out there. So information portals, this is what Drupal does really well, right? We have sites that aren't necessarily there to convert people but are there, they have the mandate to inform the public. They're often institutional websites or government websites. Sometimes they're even internal obviously no lead generation going on there. They're not a marketing brochure. They're really trying to teach or to get people information that they are specifically looking for or just that they should consume. And sites like this tend to be difficult from a content strategy perspective because it's often hard for us to define success. So how do you measure the success of a website if you can't just measure sales or you can't measure signups or registrations or something very transactional? And so the reality of a lot of projects that we work on is that measurement is more elusive. So the project here that I'm gonna highlight, the website is BANQ. This is the National Library in Quebec. I'm doing a lot of Quebec, rah, rah, rah, and here I hadn't even realized. So this is our big national library. It's also the archives. So it's like the archives that the government keeps as well as public library institution. And so the users are general library users but also researchers and librarians throughout the province. And then the website itself, the goal of the website when we started working on the project, it was clear that it was really to change the website from being just a website for getting to the services of the library to being more of a website driven around editorial content. So it was really to empower the content editing team being librarians who have something to say to actually create content through the website which is something they could never do before. And so you know when you go into a library and there's like the set of books about Black History Month or there's the set of books about the local history of this place, those types of displays. So the idea was to replicate that through the website as well as to allow people to discover all the services that the library has to offer. And so that required a lot more of a curatorial touch and a lot more features for the content editing team. So you know that you have an informative website when you're not trying to convert users. And this is a tough one, every pathway is important. So when you're doing discovery and you're asking questions about what kind of content do we want to highlight or what kind of user actions are the ones we want to encourage, it's hard to get straight answers because we actually are okay with investing in the smaller subset of users that are digging deep and want to do a specific thing that's maybe not the most popular thing on the site. And that can be especially important for websites that have a mandate to make content widely available, right? We often have a mandate to make content accessible, to make it available to as wide an audience as possible and not to necessarily discriminate and focus on users that are doing the more popular thing or the more common thing. And so for these types of projects, it could be a challenge to define success. Often success just looks like increasing usership. So increasing usership of a library, like just increasing the amount of resources people are using through the library, like that's kind of the sign of success for this type of site. But it's not really related to getting people to spend more or less time in any one part of the site. So it could be a bit hard to measure. And we often look on, we often find on these sites things like if you use government websites, they often have that little interface at the bottom of the page, like was this page useful for you? And those are informational websites trying to identify if the page or the content was successful because there's no CTA, there's no conversion. So if you have this type of site, there are some things that you should consider in terms of your governance and the strategies you can take. So often you're looking at department specific roles for content types or for sections of the website because you have different sub-organizations that have a mandate to inform on a particular topic or in a specific way. Often you're looking, you also have a mandate to make the content widely available, like that's the whole mandate, right? You wanna inform, you wanna make the content there and as available as possible. And so having guidelines for accessibility actually built into and enforced by the admin UI. So what does that look like? So some of the pages like you see in the designs here, if you can see the screenshots, you'll see there's a lot of different types of components on each page. And so it can be a challenge to make pages like this accessible because there's so much flexibility. Editorial content like this, you know, if we're asking like librarians to say, oh yeah, just build a page that talks about the topic of interest for the month and then aggregates all these books and then has like curated books and you're combining and mixing and matching different components. Yeah, it can be hard to make that content accessible. And so having a UI in Drupal that defines each component in smaller, more granular pieces, like saying, this is the field for the title and then making sure that the title has the right tag so that it's accessible. That kind of enforcement of accessibility rules is important for sites like this. This site was built with layout builder. And so it also means that we're using blocks to create things, but having some parts of the page that are always consistent, like the same type of header on every page that tends to be better for accessibility. It tends to be easier to make sure there's an H1 on every page, for example, really basic things. So those types of strategies are important for sites like this. And then finally curation tools for the editorial team. What does that mean, curation tools? So often when we're designing sites like this, we have really nice mockups that are like, oh yeah, we're gonna have this page and it's gonna collect all the books about this topic and then there's gonna be features of the month. And so the questions to ask in terms of discovery, in terms of planning a project like this are often around who's responsible for maintaining that. And are those curatorial decisions that people are making on a page by page basis or are these more algorithmic decisions where you have a view that's automatically pulling in content about a certain taxonomy term and that's it, set it and forget it. And I find that sometimes we have really nice designs but nobody asks those questions about who's putting the content there and why. And then that never gets built into the training for the website. And those kind of handoffs between content teams and developer teams and design teams are missed. So it's really important for any kind of informative website to think about, well, are we just aggregating content here or is somebody deciding that the content goes on this page and who's making that decision and why? And if we don't get different editorial teams involved in the discovery process early, like in discovery content people should be there to talk about things like this and to say, oh yeah, we have time, we wanna pick the content that's gonna go on the page about Black History Month or to say, no, we don't have time, just create a taxonomy term for it and we'll let the website do its magic. Yeah, so those are the things I would really look out for for informative portals and sites like this. Okay, so we had our three types of sites, hopefully all of you found something in there that related to your project. One thing that kind of has popped up since I proposed this talk at DrupalCon that maybe some of you have been thinking about because we work in content and websites is what does generated content mean for my site? And I think it's really an interesting question, actually, I've been trying to talk to people about it, most of them just kind of say, oh yeah, it's not ready yet, it doesn't affect me yet, my job is safe. We're nothing, this doesn't change anything. But what I think is really interesting is that if you've tried to use, if you've tried to generate content so far, people have been trying this, like forget sitting down with a blank page, let the robots write my content, yeah. I think what's really interesting is that it forces us to create prompts. So Generative AI doesn't just generate content based on nothing, we have to create prompts to ask it a question or to get it to formulate some content. And then we also have to have a way to assess if it did a job, right? So we have to maybe edit the content afterwards or we have to give it some more parameters around the content, like write content in this style or write content that performs this well or write content that is gonna attract attract traffic that's based on these keywords. So we're adding some parameters, we're giving a prompt and we're often adding parameters and those types of prompts and the parameters are all kind of related to content governance. So it's kind of forcing us to say, here's the content brief and then here's some signs for whether our content is successful or not. And that's exactly what we do when we create a content governance plan is we say, well, here's a list of all the types of content we have and here's why we're gonna create this type of content and then here's how we're gonna tell if it worked or not and we're gonna come back and check every six months. That tends to be like what a content governance plan is and with AI, for using AI as part of this process we're actually forced to verbalize that and to write it down. And so I've been working in this domain for about 15 years so it's not that long but long enough to know that there's been other phases of new ideas coming up for like how are we gonna generate more content for this website? So back in the 2010s I guess if I'm not mistaken it was user generated content. So we were all talking about oh yeah, we don't have enough time to write enough content but we just will open up the site and all the users can add content and it's gonna be great. So we were outsourcing content to our users and some sites still do that but some have abandoned ship because it's just too problematic to have people writing content. We also have tried on many projects outsourcing content to a writing team so how many of you here like you get writers like freelance writers? Yeah which is actually very similar to generative AI because you're having to give content briefs and you're having to assess and you're maybe getting people who don't belong to your institution to write content so you're forced to create a style guide and more parameters around it. And so I think with all of these techniques there remain challenges for assessing content success. With the lead generation machine type of site there's maybe more opportunity to outsource the content to people outside of an institution because you have something easier to measure in terms of success because you're trying to convert because you're trying to get users typically to do something then you can see if it's working or not and you can see is it worth hiring those writers or should I be using AI? Is the content working or is it not working? For informative websites it can be harder because accuracy is so important for governmental institutional sites and because you don't have that conversion success you can't tell if it's working. And for marketing brochure sites tends to be less useful just because the amount of content is so much less you're often trying to reduce content rather than generate a ton of it and then the actual words you're writing tend to have more weight and be more associated with your brand and you don't wanna risk that. So anyway this is something to keep in mind for the generation machine. And I'm gonna leave you just with a few extra bits of advice that should apply to any project where you have where you're working on content governance. So in terms of the planning of a project or the discovery phase I find one huge pitfall and you might think you don't do this but you leave certain people out of the planning. You say oh it's gonna take twice as long if we invite Sharon so we'll just wanna invite her and that's a mistake. Existing maintenance issues aren't raised so often we come in and it's this rosy picture of like oh yeah we're fine with how the website is edited now but it's really good to complain sometimes and that's what you should do in planning and discovery you should talk about all the problems with how content isn't kept up to date. I find in terms of the implementation a lot of times legacy content is just totally ignored so we have a great content governance for new kinds of content but nothing to address your 10,000 publications that nobody's looked at in five years. I also find often that workflows aren't tested so content people should be involved in QA, right? Especially for projects where the workflow isn't really straightforward like if you have translation workflows, if you have multiple people having to look at content before it gets published all of that should be tested in QA and again by not doing it then you're probably gonna have a launch of a new site that's a little bit more rocky you're gonna waste a bit more time later. And then in terms of the maintaining of the site the third column over here we have some issues that I find come up a lot so analytics is all this work there's all this idea of like oh we have to have analytics installed and then we're gonna have event tracking and we're gonna invest in that and then the site's launched and you come back six months later to kinda check in like how's the content governance going and nobody's looked at the analytics since nobody knows how their content is performing and especially often content people don't know how their content is performing maybe there's one SEO person like it's kind of siloed in that way and I find that's also often a big problem especially with sites that are trying to do regeneration it's really important to be looking at those that information that's coming in and then finally new staff members don't get training and onboarding so when you're looking at a typical staff who here has had team members come or go in the last first quarter of this year you've had team members join your team yeah it's pretty common to have team members join your team so having some kind of training or onboarding that includes telling them about the content governance decisions that have been made I think this is something really valuable so if you're looking for more information and maybe something tangible like I want to create a spreadsheet that tracks all the content governance decisions we've made I have a webinar and an e-book so you can sign up see I'm trying to do some lead generation here you can sign up to get the webinar and the e-book there's a link there so if you're interested in just a bit more detailed information from what this presentation offered I'd encourage you to look there or reach out to me directly if you have specific things for your project you're wondering or any questions and I think we maybe have about five minutes for questions now so I'd love to hear your thoughts or ideas or like no Suzanne I have a fourth kind of website so I feel totally ignored please let me know what you think yes oh yeah that's a good question so it's great really good it's a question about whether whether for taxonomy terms whether it's always effective to just set up taxonomy terms or what to do when content isn't tagged correctly with those vocabularies that you've set up so I think that's a really good point and it's actually by creating a dashboard to that exposes taxonomy terms as a filter like common taxonomy terms that you're using you're actually going to find out is your taxonomy system that you've set up is it effective or if you pick a certain category and you get no results and so people just aren't using it it's going to tell you that information so creating the dashboard is probably still useful because it's easy enough to create that you're going to see that as you're creating it and you can adjust of course you can also set up dashboards that use just general full text keywords as a filter so that could be another option we've even seen projects where you set up Apache solar for an internal search not just for external search so that could be you know if you really have a lot of content and you want to give authors that visibility that could be a way to do it but yeah I think it's a really like a trial and error kind of approach when you are working with the dashboards just to see what is useful for content editors or what what data it exposes yes question here oh yeah so the question is about how how do you get buy in to actually spend time talking about content governance that's a really good question I think that it's something you could build as part of the discovery process if you get the right people in the room initially so maybe you try to organize a discovery workshop and it's not the content team that's invited but rather it's kind of more decision maker like quote-unquote stakeholders or you know people who are invested in the project maybe because they're paying for it and and so to convince them I mean I think it's good to start asking questions about the content itself so trying to get those people to realize that they don't know everything about their site they often we get discovery workshops where people have not looked at their own website content in quite some time and might be making a lot of assumptions about what their how valuable it is so trying to get them to tell that to realize that themselves through the workshop process and through making questions about you know what kind of user experience we're trying to create what kind of user journey and what kind of content that requires might help then you lead to the takeaways of that being oh well because of your answers here now we need to talk to the content team and now we need to invest a little bit more in in thinking about how we're going to create more effective content over time so we'll be one way to do it is just try to get them to come to that conclusion themselves yeah question here yeah so the question is around if you have a lot of stakeholders in a project how do you get them to focus on a reasonable number of CTAs and goals for the project I think often we can do this by looking at other sites and sometimes a really good type of usability testing to do is one that doesn't require as much investment in design it's a comparative usability testing where you're looking at other sites that often you ask at the beginning of a project well what are other websites that you like and then you can actually do usability testing on those to see are they successful and what you'll often find is that sites that have fewer CTAs that are just clearer like people have a much easier time navigating them so if that's your goal is to try to convince people that a certain UI is good it might be to say well here's a site that uses this UI that I'm proposing here's this site that has 10 calls to action on every page because that's what you're asking for and let's see which one does better I'm not sure what we're going to find but let's just try it and see if there are other sites that you don't expect but you might also just use that as more of a data driven way of convincing them any other questions well thank you all for coming it's great to have so much excitement around this and thank you thank you for this