AcademyHealth

Content Before Code

AcademyHealth had a significant amount of content that had not been refreshed in a very long time, largely in part because it was difficult to reorganize and update content in their previous content system. Palantir’s strategy team recognized that planning for the refresh of the content contained within the AcademyHealth site would be just as important as selecting the right technology for its new home.

“How will the content live in this new space?” – Michelle Jackson, Web Strategist at Palantir

Creating a new website is a key opportunity for editorial teams to restructure their site’s legacy content. If old content is migrated to the new site without restructuring, a huge opportunity is missed to make sure all content is current and going to the right place, with no outdated links to old locations. It also allows an organization to be creative and innovative in their thinking on how they can improve their messaging and create better content than they had before.

GatherContent was determined to be the perfect tool that would allow the AcademyHealth editorial team to review, prepare, and better their content before publishing to the new Drupal site being built by Palantir.

Providing Structure for Content

For many organizations, the idea of restructuring legacy content can be really daunting. Without parameters, it becomes easy to focus too much on getting core parts of the content complete enough to use, with the plan to finalize later. One thing that was really essential for AcademyHealth was to provide them with a means to wrangle their many editors’ revisions as they reworked each individual piece of content in advance of the new site launch.

GatherContent helped mitigate the issues that could come from having multiple editors by providing guardrails for AcademyHealth’s content. The Palantir development team set up fields in GatherContent early on that created structure for a feedback loop between AcademyHealth’s product owner and the many editors who were working on revising pieces of content. By standardizing fields early on, the product owner was able to maintain a certain level of control over multiple departments’ efforts.

Using Real Content in the Design

When the development team does not know where content is coming from, it makes it difficult to plan functionality, let alone begin development. A lack of definition around the data being migrated can make things so much more complicated and can slow down the whole redesign process to incorporate rounds of revision. Using GatherContent locked that potential issue down and gave Palantir’s development team a well-known data set.

“ Code doesn't become a website until there is navigation and content. Very few of the sites we build have zero editorial content.” - Bec White, Development Operations Manager at Palantir

AcademyHealth began preparing their content early in the redesign process, which meant their entire baseline content was ready before development even began. At the end of the first sprint, they were able to see real content in the current menu structure, and it gave them an opportunity to have an authentic reaction to how content would live in the new site.

“It made it real, right from the beginning.” – Bec White, Development Operations Manager at Palantir

AcademyHealth validated information architecture and design through collaborative in-person and virtual testing. The Palantir team was then able to pull those user testing findings into GatherContent, so that the editorial team could tweak and add additional pages as necessary. Some of the design decisions were tied to the fact that AcademyHealth had so much content, and their information architecture was very verbose in that they had a lot of ways of talking about their research and making healthcare better. Using GatherContent created a way for Palantir to design and develop a site that matched exactly what AcademyHealth needed because they had control over the content being used as source data.

Automated Migration

The turnaround time between AcademyHealth gaining access to their new Drupal 8 site and site launch was quick, largely in part because all of the content had been prepared in advance. The Palantir team made this process even more efficient by writing a Drupal 8 migration source plugin for the GatherContent API. The AcademyHealth team then just had to do a quick, final review of content, following the same review process they had been using throughout the whole project, without having to create any last minute pages.

The Results

The AcademyHealth editorial team touched every piece of content, and it gave them real ownership of change. Because they were so engaged in improving their content, it made the whole process quite seamless. The added bonus created by GatherContent was the ability for both teams to see their work merge together quickly.