Outsourcing Migration Can Save Your Project (and Sanity)

The Simplest Journey

Content migration projects are deceivingly simple. Yes, on a basic level they often include copy/pasting content into your new site. But don’t be fooled: without adaptive planning and thoughtful execution migration can suck at your time and resources.

Here is a scenario we see often:

The finish line is in sight for your ongoing web redesign project. While the new site is beautiful and functional, aside from some placeholder cat photos and boilerplate text, it's completely empty. All along, you thought migration would be the simplest stretch of your journey, but the length of your remaining to-do list is daunting and now that the time has come you’re surprised at the length of your remaining to-do list.

The truth is migration projects are a lot of work.

You’ve got to:

• Set project goals
• Develop a system to organize and analyze existing content
• Plan for content production and migration:
  • Who is available for copywriting and migration work?
  • How will they be trained?
  • Does your launch timeline take available resources into account?
  • How will you track progress and assignments?
  • What tools will you use?
• Assign and address copywriting needs for each page
• Determine and implement the best method of migration

And this should've been done . . . yesterday?!

It’s easy to feel blindsided by the scope and shifting needs of content production and migration work involved in even the simplest of projects. By hiring an expert team, you can save yourself from a lot of surprises and regrouping later on.

Our Expanded Services

Fastspot has expanded our migration services, which are available to new clients and retainers independent of any site redesign work. To date, we’ve led ten migration projects for nationally-recognized cultural and educational institutions in a variety of content management systems (CMS)—Cascade, Drupal, Wordpress, Craft and BigTree. Our clients include names like Southeast Missouri State University, ConocoPhillips, Ford House, and the Chicago Council of Global Affairs.

Most recently, we completed the migration of eight department subsites for a University. Our team was initially scoped to migrate just one department subsite on the tail of a website redesign project. But—much like in the scenario laid out above—they realized how complex and time consuming it can be to plan and implement migration across multiple departments.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

With many challenges—anticipated and not—an adaptable, customized approach is essential to success. The needs of a project change rapidly, and it takes a nimble team and flexible menu of services to address them.

Here are some scenarios:

1. Your team may find they can speedily draft written content, but locating and optimizing imagery jolts them out of their groove and significantly increases time spent per page. Ask your project manager about adding image optimization and curation to your project. Fastspot’s team will size, optimize and upload your images to speed up content production.
2. Your launch deadline is arriving, but a section of your content isn’t as buttoned-up as you’d like. Fastspot can use the hours slotted for manual migration however is most useful to your team, whether that be leaving careful notes in our migration tracking spreadsheet during our quality assurance process or returning to migration at a later date.
3. Due to limited copywriting resources, your team doesn’t have time to carefully stage all of your landing page content. But, you don’t want to throw everything in WYSIWYG either. Fastspot can reassign manual migration hours from your Statement of Work to create content outlines. Or, maybe you don’t have time for any content staging beyond your core set of landing pages. Fastspot migrators can exercise editorial judgement to get your content into the CMS in a visually appealing way.

Although outsourcing migration to an expert team can go a long way to prevent roadblocks, every project comes with a set of unique challenges dependent on your CMS, design system, the current state of your content, and available copywriting and migration resources. Our expanded services are designed to meet your team where you are, and support your work to the finish line.

Let's Work Together!

Do you have a migration project weighing you down, or are you interested in learning more about how we can help? Contact Us.