Moving home
- Article 22 of 26
- M-iD, August 2005
Shifting content from one web site to another is not an easy task. But following a number of basic rules can make it easier.
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Consultancy help might still be necessary, however, and System Associates uses its own scripts as well as a simpler tool, HTML tidy, for its migration projects. Other tools, such as those for cleaning the badly written HTML that Microsoft Word typically generates, can also be of use.
However, warns Macken, typically only half of the cleansing required in a content migration exercise can be automated with such tools; a further one-third can be 'semi-automated', with some human intervention required; while the remaining 20% will require a human being to supervise the whole translation and cleaning.
Subtleties
A move from one heavyweight content management system to another will need even more careful planning. Many of the details were covered in Best Practice last month, but there are some subtleties peculiar to some web content management systems that bear mentioning.
Not only will the content need migrating, but the templates used by the existing system will need rewriting for the new system and workflows might need migrating and converting as well. These will often be incompatible, however, and may even operate using different approaches. For example, some systems let users 'check in' content, locking it while they work on it, before releasing it by checking it out. Others, however, will allow users to pass content to other users and allocate tasks.
Converting from one system to another simply may not be worth the effort. Frequently, starting afresh with the same users, but with content either published or ready to be workflowed anew, will provide the simplest and most cost effective approach.
Online questionnaires, especially those set up by third-parties, will need rewriting from scratch or to be brought over as static content, unless they were developed on a platform independent medium, such as Macromedia Flash.
With any large site, migrating all the content at once is unfeasible, so the migration should proceed section by section. 'Spiders' - programs that can read web pages and check them for specific content - can be set-up to crawl the finished pages to ensure link consistency, and both sites should be running concurrently for some time to ensure a smooth transition while bugs are ironed out.
Migrating a web site is by no means as easy as it sounds, with obstacles both technological and financial that need to be overcome. However, by using the appropriate tools, judiciously choosing what can be discarded and what should be kept, and employing the right skills, it is possible to keep the pain - and cost - to a minimum.
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