Too much stuff! Content strategy for museum websites

Web publishing systems and distributed authorship can lead to almost endless publishing: easily, quickly, and by lots of people. That’s great, but we rapidly have TOO MUCH STUFF. As a result, quality suffers, maintenance is hard and users struggle to find the content they’re looking for.

So who should be overseeing the development of museum online content? Who can spot the gaps and overlaps? Who is making sure the effort we assign to our websites is pointed in the right direction? The Content Strategist can.

In this one hour workshop, we will present an approach for content strategy for museum websites, including:

* Dealing with the old stuff – whether to delete, update or migrate existing content
* Making great new stuff – working out what stuff to make, how to ensure it’s great, how to structure it and how to plan its life cycle from the outset
* Keeping your users happy – how to understand what your user wants and needs, and how to ensure the internal demands of the organisation don’t commandeer the content

We will draw on real-life examples from the Museum Victoria website (museumvictoria.com.au), a behemoth of 65,000+ pages. The site was redeveloped in 2007 and now demands a rethink.

Who should attend?

This workshop is for those who are struggling to keep up with an ever-growing online presence. It will also be useful for those who are planning a redevelopment, or maybe just getting started with a new website for their organisation, whether large or small.