Data Migration Techniques

We at Vamosa recently conducted a survey of UK and US private and public sector organizations to uncover: who is responsible for websites; what is involved in the day-to-day management of websites; and how website performance is measured. Over 100 webmasters, IT project managers and web marketing staff completed the survey.

The results provided us with some valuable insights into web operations management, focused on the very real day-to-day challenges.

The survey clearly showed that the web team is inundated with a variety of requests and projects. They are most commonly tasked with publishing content - 90% of respondents handling such requests. Fixing broken links is also a major issue for the web team, with 84% dealing with link cohesion problems. Implementing and maintaining technical standards, such as web accessibility, were also dealt with by 71% of respondents. Finally, ensuring SEO performance was optimized was carried out by web teams approximately two-thirds of the time – in fact SEO and general site performance were the most frequently logged requests that the web team had to deal with.

In addition to the tasks highlighted above, the survey also found that the majority of web maintenance and management is carried out in house, not handled by external agencies. A third of all web teams stated that they were responsible for between 76% and 90% of all task requests while another third of respondents said that their web team was fully responsible for all tasks.  When you consider the daily demands that Web teams are faced with, it is clear that teams need to be efficient in fixing errors before they get out of control.

Vamosa has introduced WebWorxx to put web teams in the driving seat by completing daily crawls of websites. ‘Hotspots’ on the homescreen show where the most common issues on your website are occurring and places them in rank order.  The web operation teams can then create specific ‘focus areas’ designed to address a particular sub-set of the problems identified. Work can then be assigned as a project to team members, to work through the tasks and resolve problems. Notes can be captured against tasks and even marked up on the page where the error occurs - all within the WebWorxx collaborative portal. This means everyone is fully aware of the status of assigned tasks at all times.

WebWorxx monitors web properties against a configurable list of policies, dependent on your specific requirements. These policies incorporate a range of typical web operations issues such as:
•    Accessibility (26 Policies)
•    Search Engine Optimization (10 Policies)
•    Brand Compliance (8 Policies)
•    Governance (4 Policies)
•    Data Protection (7 Policies)
•    HTML Standards (2 Policies)

Web teams are clearly under time pressure to complete a wide variety of tasks efficiently and effectively. WebWorxx allows proactive management of day-to-day requirements of web operations management putting the web team back in control.











To find out more about how WebWorxx can support the day-to-day management of your website visit: WebWorxx or download the free 14 day WebWorxx trial now.

Today, an organizations Website is usually the first point of contact that a customer has with a company. As such it is essential that your Website is as compelling as possible and people are not turned off it. In order to ensure your customers benefit from using your site, your content should be descriptive, readable, accessible and consistent.

However, ensuing Website governance and maintaining an error free web presence is a huge undertaking. Errors such as duplicate content being published, broken links and incorrect tagging are inevitable. It is essential that organizations can work quickly to rectify these issues before customers recognize them, which often result in missed sales, lost baskets and incomplete forms.

In order to ensure these concerns are dealt with promptly, collaboration within web operations teams is essential. Web teams should not have to be reliant on raising support tickets to find and fix errors, team members must be able to dedicate the right resource to fixing errors, allowing them to get on with more pertinent work and not continually struggle with technical emergencies.

WebWorxx allows web teams to gain control of their sites, by providing the information they require to proactively manage site performance. This not only allows their web estates to continuously improve but provides customers with a truly impressive web experience allowing you to convert visitors into sales.

To understand how WebWorxx can help give you back control of your Website and improve web operations management, download the free 14 day trail.

The daily challenges associated with managing a website and its content are vast and hugely varied. A diverse range of people contribute to a corporate site: not only those traditionally responsible for web content such as web developers, webmasters, web authors, digital marketing managers and marketing managers, but also occasional contributors such as web authors and many varying members of IT .

This complex network of individuals inputting content and managing web assets or performance inevitably leads to errors  such as duplicate content, broken links, incorrect tagging and content that is difficult to find.
WebWorxx allows web teams to organize and execute web projects more effectively to improve transparency and productivity. As WebWorxx is a collaborative tool, the user responsible for web content compliance, for example, can generate work packages and delegate specific issues to content owners who can then be tasked with resolving them.

To see how WebWorxx can help you overcome the many issues associated with web operations management, we’re currently offering a free 14-day free trial. To find out more visit http://www.vamosa.com/webworxx-c121.

We are excited to announce the launch of a 14-day trial of WebWorxx to give those responsible for web content compliance a view of how this can be easily managed day-to-day.

The 14-day trial is available now and all users need to do is enter some quick details and the link to the website they would like to monitor.

WebWorxx will then get to work on crawling the website content and analyze the performance based on set policy areas including accessibility, brand compliance, search engine optimization, links cohesion, HTML and language.

Within 2hrs the portal will generate a report that is emailed to the user who will be invited to log into the account to view the results. A member of the Vamosa WebWorxx team will be in touch to talk through the findings and advise on next steps.

As WebWorxx is a collaborative tool, the user responsible for web content compliance can generate work packages and delegate the content owners to resolve any issues found. As an ‘out of the box’ solution it is set up with 63 policies but the client has control of these and can turn off whichever ones are not relevant.

We’ve already had 50 users download the trial so try it for yourself and see how WebWorxx can simplify managing website content and optimization.

To find out more visit http://www.vamosa.com/webworxx-c121

While sitting with a customer recently I feared I was sounding like a broken record.  I wrestled over should I let this topic go that did not sit right with me?  As a supplier to this important customer, was it my duty to agree to a requirement that I knew would result in business resistance or should I highlight the consequences of implementing the perceived solution?

With resources readily available, through the internet, it is more common to come across customers who have already ‘self-diagnosed’ what they require from you even before any engagement has taken place.  With over 11 million hits coming back on the internet when you enter “content migration” into Google, the logic as to why this is such a popular search term for 2010 is apparent: the trend demonstrates that customers needs to find out more about content migration before approaching a CMS vendor and prior to selecting the best practice migration approach in order to ensure the best solution is delivered. ‘Surely’ – they tell themselves – ‘I can apply the same logic to selecting the best migration vendor as I would to (say) purchasing a car or house?’

Here lies the challenge for both the customer and the vendor; self diagnosis can be dangerous for both the success of your project and the future health of your web content; as the challenge of migrating content is a complex one.

I believe what sets Vamosa apart is how seriously we take our responsibility to perform a relevant and credible diagnosis for all customers.  All symptoms are identified before we progress to designing a solution.  During this diagnosis we discuss the consequences of such decisions and allow the customer to see potential negative effects for their end customer and also the impact this might have upon the acceptance of their new portal environment.

For this particular client, the self-diagnosed solution was to manually clean up 90% of their content post migration. However, the recommended solution was to clean up this content through an automated approach prior to the migration, helping to save both time and money.  The result for me was helping a customer with surfacing critical issues prior to the migration.  Finding the correct parameters to resolve these issues helped them to achieve a successful project. This is the way I have established long lasting relationships with all Vamosa customers during my seven years at Vamosa. Trust and understanding are key to a successful project.

Download the Content Migration: Seven Steps to Success White Paper to further understand the business benefits of taking a planned approach to content migrations.