About the process
An intranet migration is a chance to reassess what’s working and make user-oriented changes to front-end and back-end systems.
Case study: Intranet migration from OpenText to WordPress
Role: Content designer
Collaborators: Intranet publishing team, product, development, design
Company: RBC Wealth Management
Objective: Migrate RBC’s Dominion Securities intranet from OpenText to WordPress.
Project context
At one time, the RBC Dominion Securities intranet site had over 800,000 assets and 2,600 pages. The site was, to put it mildly, unwieldly.
Making updates and building pages on OpenText was time consuming and increasingly unsustainable. Users struggled to find what they needed, URLs were broken, the navigation was inconsistent and search was barely functional.
The publishing team had just 8 months to collaborate with product, development, design, and an external vendor to purge unnecessary pages, rebuild the architecture, design a better navigation, and get the site up and running on WordPress.
Due to proprietary ownership, I’m unable to provide visual examples. This case study outlines our process with a few artifacts from planning.
Content design in the migration
As one of three content designers, I collaborated with the team to:
- Rewrite all URLs using consistent naming conventions (pre-migration)
- Lead a team to reformat and check every page for the sections we were assigned
- Learn the WordPress publishing platform and act as the lead content designer on layout structures and processes
- Create supporting documentation so the publishers, developers, and product team could follow standardized design rules throughout the reformatting
- Build the mega menu navigation
Each content designer was assigned approximately one third of the site to manage the clean-up, navigation, and URL structure. I was assigned Investment Management and a secure part of the site just for managers.
I mapped out each section of the site and discovered that some navigation hierarchies were as much as 8 levels deep. This was far too many clicks for our users. We needed to get it down to a maximum of 5 clicks.
As we took stock of the site and audited the pages, we applied a few rules to the URLs.
URL and page naming rules
No abbreviations or cut-off words
Legacy pages were auto-generated with cut-off words and abbreviations. To create didactic, clear URLs we updated URLs to use the full word.
No articles such as “the” or “and”
By eliminating articles, we shortened many URLs and made them easier for SEO to parse.
Eliminate duplicate page titles and apply didactic descriptors
To ensure clarity for SEO and users, we made sure each page title was descriptive to the department and subject. For example, many departments had “accounts” pages so we added descriptors such as “investment accounts”. Similarly, we changed names that poorly described the page, were out of date, or potentially confusing.
Dashes instead of underscores between words
The OpenText system automatically generated pages with underscores in the URL. To bring the site up to industry standards, our developers wrote a script to replace underscores with dashes.
As the lead content designer, I wrote the rules for the content clean-up guide used by the publishing team, developers, and project managers
Once we got into the migrated site, we needed to clean-up the pages- fast! Over four months, I led the content designers and clean-up team to:
- Check every page for block accuracy, meaning layout, writing and formatting had to be corrected.
- Redesign all featured stories from the past two years to meet the new site design (over 60 in total).
- Ensure the front-end navigation worked and URLs weren’t broken.
- Check for broken links.
- Create new pages where necessary.
Results
The site migration took place on January 24 (coincidentally my birthday) and we spent the next two weeks serving as customer care for the employees of Dominion Securities, fixing anything that was missed and helping people navigate the newly migrated site.
chill content design 