Finalize your content list and project timeline

These are two critical documents. The timeline covers all major (and possibly minor) project deadlines. The content spreadsheet contains an entry for every page of your site. Describe your content needs in as detailed a manner as possible in the content spreadsheet

Developing Content and Staying on Schedule

Late content is a chronic problem. All the project management books tell you to plan for it. Most of us at the University have had to take on extra work already, so how can you avoid it?

• Hire or designate an editor. Some folks can't write or can't write quickly. The non-writers on my project teams (including myself) generally take 2-3 times as long to come up with their copy as someone who wordsmiths for a living. Tell your content providers they're not responsible for perfect writing, just for coming up with a draft of the content. Be sure to build time in for the editorial process.
• Stress that "on-time" is better than perfect.
• The above approach is not effective when dealing with perfectionists. Assure these folks that they can improve their work after the site is up.
• Subdeadlines are critical. Have clear, reasonable, and weekly or bi-weekly subdeadlines and check in on a regular basis. The provost site had hundreds of pages. We cut the job into little pieces by setting up weekly meetings with content batches due every week. The site got done on schedule.

Create a writing template

• page title
• filename
• status (needs copy creation, needs copy update, completed--same thing for art)
• due date. Now is an excellet time to remind your content providers of their deadlines

If your department has print publications

alert them as soon as possible to your new urls.

Now that you've figured out who, what, why and where and when, it's time to move on to how...