Best Practices: Managing Sites and Content

■

Note:

This article contains best practices for managing your sites and content. For instructions on how to create sites, click here. 

Proper governance requires resources and ongoing commitment from an organization. 

• Understand the requirements and standards of a site: Simpplr advises Site managers maintain certain standards for the quality of their content, as well as stick to requirements for all sites across the intranet.
• Create and secure a steering committee: The best governance team requires a cross-functional approach.
• Distribute federated ownership: Identifying individuals who will help set up, and update the intranet across the organization. 
• Create clear guidelines: Intranets should have easy to follow guidelines and criteria which enables employee engagement, and doesn’t restrict it. 
• Maintain your site: Decide your long-term strategy now for keeping content fresh and relevant.
• Provide support and training: A process is needed that supports the onboarding, equipping, and regular assistance for managers and publishers.

Understand the requirements and standards of a site

All sites on Simpplr have a certain set of requirements and standards to meet. Before creating your site, consider:

• Site planning: What content, files, links, etc. will be included on the site?
• Site purpose: What is the purpose of this site? Does it add value to team members?
• Managing and maintenance of the site: Who will carry the responsibility of Site manager(s) and maintain the site over time?
• Marketing and promotion of the site: How do you plan on getting word out that the site exists?
• Breadth of information and audience: How much unique information will be available on the site that does not currently exist elsewhere on the intranet? And who is the intended audience? 

Once you have a clear vision for your site, keep in mind that all sites across Simpplr must meet the following requirements. A site must:

• Adhere to the use of internal-only content 
• Contain information that is not highly confidential
• Have multiple content items (i.e. pages, events, albums)
• Have multiple pages, events and albums associated with it
• Have an owner and at least one manager
• Be updated regularly (quarterly minimum)
• Be work appropriate
• Have a banner image and thumbnail
• Have carousel content (3-6 items)

Create and secure a steering committee

Cross-functional business units and locations need to commit to ongoing representation to ensure the intranet and communication strategies ongoing success. The group should meet regularly, have executive sponsorship and leadership oversight. This committee typically meets monthly or quarterly to review what’s working, assess which sites/knowledge are underserved and continually align with high level company-wide goals. 

Distribute federated ownership

Simpplr was created to make configurations and content creation easy so updates can happen at the speed of business. This means intranet ownership can be decentralized and responsibility shared among content owners and publishers. When a distributed content administration model is adopted, the quality and volume of the content increase across the platform.  

Create clear guidelines for Site managers

Site managers should have clear guidelines for creating and maintaining sites. Before creating any site, it's helpful to prepare a template that outlines your vision.

All Site owners/managers should consider the following questions when planning sites:

• Who is my audience?
  • Define the target audience, i.e. who will consume the information on your site. Subscriptions can help you gain initial site follows.
  • Define your site's access. Will the site be private, allowing limited access to only site members, or public, which allows open visibility on the intranet?
• Is there a site or page already for this audience?
  • Consider how you plan to set your site apart from existing material. Are you providing new information that your audience finds valuable?
  • Should your content go on the existing site/page? 
• How often will this information be updated? 
• How is your audience going to access the content?
  • If you expect your audience to access the site through the mobile app for example, focus on constructing thoughtful content in pages that can be easily consumed on a mobile device.
  • If you expect most users to get your information through Search, use topics and informative titles to allow more visibility into your content.
• Who is going to maintain the site? 
• How will your business leaders participate? 
• What do you want on your site dashboard and why? 
  • Determine whether or not having dynamic content on your dashboard helps support your site's purpose.
  • Should your dashboard contain links, files or social campaigns?
  • Remember to think about how you want your audience to find and consume your information quickly and efficiently.
  • Do you want to use the feed to have forum style postings on the site, or should you restrict feed posts?

Maintain your site

Creating a Site manager agreement is about keeping the site relevant and up to date. Adhering to the above guidelines, being responsive to feedback, participating in the monthly/quarterly governance meeting are intrinsic to a long-term strategy.   

Provide support and training

Provide tier-1 support on how to use the system and train Site managers/content contributors and creators. These people will all need adequate support and training to ensure technology doesn’t add friction to the governance process.  

• Onboarding Site managers with training and office hours in the beginning will ensure good adoption. 
• In addition to text, use as many screenshots and as much video as possible!