Managing Out of Date Content
Having read Gerry McGovern’s article in September about how to manage out of date content it was only a matter of time before one bored post-Christmas morning my time would be focused on the archives. These posts numbered about 330 and went back to July 4, 2007. Several hours later they numbered only 275 and about 60 posts had been extracted out of my archives. Why? About one in six posts on this site are either general banter, or are time relevant and becomes out of date. Do you need to wade through posts about Blue Beanie Day 2007? Or my first semester 2008 university marks?
And when you think about it, the usability impact for someone trolling through the articles page or searching for more specific content is improved. Less clutter, less cognitive wear and tear, and higher likelihood of finding content.
But, and I’m asking this tentatively, how many bloggers aren’t looking at that aspect of their website? There’s a good argument to be had for revisiting the statistics to see what pages aren’t being looked at by anyone – maybe they need to be scrubbed, too. On my articles page where it lists all the published articles since 2007 it would be so much clearer for those actually using the website if the noise of uninteresting posts were removed. Did that sound blasphemous? Yes, removing pages that aren’t being viewed can probably free up your site for those who actually come there for information and resources.
Originally this blog was a hand coded learning curve back in late 2003 / early 2004. Luckily that content no longer exists for me to deal with. Eventually I moved to WordPress and started from scratch – clean site, empty database. In early 2007 I stopped blogging for a semester, deleted the database and let that domain name drop, but that let two years of prolific blogging go in one click of the delete button. So, luckily, I only have 18 months of archives to deal with here. But some blogs have thousands of posts, and thousands of comments.
Which leaves me with a big question – how are you managing your out of date content? Are you managing it? Have you considered the usability benefit to removing the clutter? Imagine if you could walk out into the city streets and pull most of that superfluous noise straight out of the world (Matrix style)… clearer sounds, sweeter air, the raw pound of your heart as you walk on the pavement. It’s worth considering.
