Common sense strategies for maintaining quality content

How Mass.gov authors & editors from MassWildlife and the Executive Office of the Trial Court maintain huge amounts of content and seasonal information.

MassWildlife’s Emily Stolarski, Digital Services’ Bob Brown and Trial Court’s Michelle Ciccarelli at ConCon 2018.

One of the biggest challenges that authors and editors working in Mass.gov’s Drupal-based content management system (CMS) face is making sure their content is up to date: sometimes necessary changes are predictable, other times they’re not.

So we invited authors and editors to our recent Digital Services Content Conference (ConCon), and asked them to share best practices for handling thousands of pages and documents, and keeping it all fresh.

Publishing newsletters and social media posts regularly helps to keep MassWildlife’s content team on top of updates to its Mass.gov pages.

Michelle Ciccarelli, web administrator with the Executive Office of the Trial Court, and Emily Stolarski, communications coordinator for the Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, discussed the internal operations, customized CMS tools (e.g., analytics dashboards), and third-party tech tools they use to maintain and improve content. While some of this discussion deals with the particulars of the Mass.gov CMS, much of what Ciccarelli and Stolarski shared can be adopted by any content strategy team.

Here’s a recording of the session, which took place at District Hall Boston.

ConCon 2018 panel session: “Strategies for maintaining quality content” (video)

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