The workroom workshop
When it comes to website migration and refreshing old content, I have a technique I love to use. It proves efficient and effective time and time again. It works in situations where there are many stakeholders to involve in a project, but you can’t feasibly work with them all on a daily basis. These stakeholders may have an area of expertise — they may be the subject matter experts of just one section of your website. All of these opinions coming at you on a daily basis can be … busy.
So, that’s where the workroom workshop comes into play.
What is a workroom workshop?
It involves booking a meeting room or a shared working space (ideally this activity is done with everyone in person). Print out all of the pages currently live on the website within the sections you’ll be migrating. It can be a good idea to do specific sections at a time instead of printing the entire website (i.e. focus on Help in one session only). Next, put all the pages on the walls of the meeting room in the groups that they currently exist in. Finally, get a pen and paper ready and set the stakeholders free.
What’s the goal?
By the end of your workroom workshop you’ll have an idea of:
what pages to keep, delete, or merge together
what the new IA could potentially look like
who your most engaged stakeholders are
which stakeholder can make the big decisions for each section
Tips and tricks
The content creator and/or content strategist involved in the project should be the one running this workshop. They are the person who will be doing the grunt work of bringing all the copy together, so it makes sense to have the stakeholders work with them, get to know them, and know they are the point of contact.
Book a meeting room for a whole day, and treat it like a drop-in clinic. Let stakeholders know they don’t need to be there all day and they can pop in when they have a spare half an hour or so.
Have enough pens and post-its available for stakeholders to leave notes on the paper on the wall.
Set up two days of writing and admin for yourself after the workroom workshop. Trust me, there will be a lot of this to do.
Running a workroom workshop is one of my specialties. If you have a migration or a website refresh project on the horizon, get in touch. I’d love to get involved.