The real cost of ignoring content governance

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Nobody bills you for neglecting content governance. The cost shows up somewhere else.

Content is the part of a project most likely to be underestimated and most likely to delay a launch. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Where the cost lands

• Time spent on work that should not have been necessary
• Enquiries that quietly never arrive
• Someone must own each page or it rots
• Rework, once the problem is finally visible

Set review dates when content is published. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

A reasonable first step

Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

In practice

Writing for the web is largely an editing job: the first draft is always longer than it needs to be. Three things worth confirming about content governance before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Removing outdated content is maintenance, not loss — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

The point is not perfection, it is knowing which of these you have consciously chosen to skip.