Getting started with content governance
The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. A short on-ramp to content governance for teams who have not touched it before.
Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
Why this earns attention
Someone must own each page or it rots. The cost of getting this wrong is rarely visible on the day it happens. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.
Your first week
- Find out what is already in place
- Set review dates when content is published
- Change one thing and measure it
Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.
The short version
Pages that answer a real question outlive pages written to fill a slot in a sitemap. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:
- Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
- Someone must own each page or it rots — and you know whether that is true here
- There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped
If any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.