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Have you read “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” by Marie Kondo? The book was rightfully a sensation upon publication because of it’s innovative and no-nonsense approach to dealing with building a healthy and peaceful home. And for packrats like me, the book was refreshing in the sense that it seemed to recognize the human reasons we hold onto things. It meets the reader where we are. It doesn’t assume that simply by buying a lot of gadgets and organizers at the Container Store, the messy among us can magically transform our spaces into an oasis of calm with the snap of fingers.
Instead, Marie asks us to think about what we value. In one memorable passage in the book, she says to pulls all of your clothes out of a dresser and one by one hold each item of clothing and ask yourself: “Does this spark joy?” Instead of superimposing a complex organizational system over the stuff we have and may not even need, Marie wants us to be intentional about what we keep and also what we add.
Marie Kondo’s mindset has influenced more than just my approach to organizing my closets. It’s often the analogy I reach for when I work with clients who work in legacy organizations — arts and cultural organization with long histories and sometimes quite extensive online archives. Sometimes they will hire us and say: “We need a _content migration,_ for you to take all of our pages and move them into a new container that is modern and mobile friendly.
But in the same way when you move you don’t simply box up everything around you and move it into a new space, so too should websites not be thought of as a warehouse of pages. You want intentionality built into the process. You want to think about the ways your staff and your visitors use your content. So instead of being a technical afterthought, really the content part of the equation is where you should start the process of figuring out what you value, and making serious choices about what can stay and what should be cast aside.
All website are mobile websites
Even though “mobile responsive” design has been a reality for about a decade now, I find that folks are still adjusting to the changes that mobile websites have wrought. The biggest one for our purposes is that people want to scroll rather than need to click through a sea of branching pages.
If you are at an arts and cultural institution that is a big change. And it’s exactly the challenge we were dealing with when we worked with Two River Theater. Over a number of years, pages had been added on top of pages on their website. The navigation had grown. There were duplicates. What more, the organization system for pages desperately needed to be overhauled.
We were initially hired to migrate the site to WordPress so that the staff could easily edit it, but our role grew to the point where we reworked the structure of the site substantially into areas and landing pages rather than long laundry lists of pages.
The most overlooked component of website redesigns
How to Reimagine Your Content
Quick quiz: what appears most often on your website?
The answer is words.
For some reason, words become an afterthought. How can that be?
Your website is composed primarily of words, but when contemplating a website redesign, most people first focus on the surface level of design, the container your website will sit in.
The biggest overlooked component of a website redesign project is content.
As a consequence, organizations hire based on design rather than their expertise with content. They think that if the design looks good, everything else will fall into place. That’s exactly backwards.
Form should follow function. If you get the content right, design will fall into place.
In our time working in the digital space, we’ve worked with many, many legacy arts and cultural institution that have histories stretching back well into the past century. It’s no surprise then, that their websites are often as stuffed to the gills as their archives.
These projects often start with an RFP, but there’s actually a better place to start.
##Marie Kondo for the Arts or Cultural Organization
When I’m having web redesign conversation with a client I often talk them through this analogy: when you are moving, you don’t simply load all of your various and sundry items in a truck and move them to a new place do you?
You first go through a process of winnowing. You realize you have two cake plates and only need one.
I’d take it a step further and ask you to consider the great Marie Kondo. Marie Kondo became rightly famous for
##Steps for a
##What content migration _really_ means
##Why you shouldn’t start with design
Many organizations start with design
