When launching a new website, we will usually have a well thought strategy in place, but afterwards tools and strategies for keeping track of the content will be missing. This has consequences that accumulate when we are unaware of them.
Gavin Colborne, Founder of the web governance platform Little Forest. Photo by Janus Boye while in London, September 2018
Gavin Colborne founder of the UK-based software vendor Little Forest has a long background within content creation and management, working with different CMS's. However, Gavin founded Little Forest in 2013, because he felt a vast under prioritization of the governance part of content. On the telephone from London, he admits that web governance doesn’t have a very sexy ring to it. Even for him the creation of content is the exciting part:
Definitely. However, solely focusing on content creation is like planting flowers in the spring and then ignoring them for the remainder of the year. It doesn’t really make for much of a garden.
Why aren’t we keeping better track of our content?
It’s pretty much unthinkable not to measure the effect of ads on social or search. How come content on websites isn’t always getting the same attention? In Gavin’s experience it often has to do with the scale of it. Today even relatively small organizations have large quantities of content on their sites, and continually keeping track and measuring the functionality and effectiveness across platforms, search and social, can seem like a daunting task. So, in the daily rush of things, we tend to move on and forget about it.
The benefits of a web governance platform
When it comes to websites, functionality and effectiveness is two sides of the same coin, which is why a web governance platform that monitors both will usually be a big help for content creators and marketers. Manually going through all the organizations sites and subsites to see if anything has broken down, could take up a big chunk of your workday. For many digital professionals this is a real worry, which is why Gavin actually describes the benefit of a web governance program as not just practical, but also psychological:
“Today even relatively small organizations often have a relatively big digital presence, and with an accelerated pace in creating new content, it’s easy to lose track of what you actually have lying around. This can result in a feeling of losing control. Web governance platforms are about providing people with an overview that inspires them to move forward more effectively and without doubt.
Content shouldn’t be the headache of an entire organization
In larger organizations the different websites can be a common headache, since many different people within the organization are depended on the different parts of it, but might not be directly involved with it.
Gavin has become increasingly aware of such aspects by spending time with other members of the Boye & Company network, where he not only meets people working within the same area, but also different professionals from the same organization:
It’s seems clear that the future of web governance will involve a larger array of different professionals within the organization, which from my point of view makes effective web governance even more important in the years to come.
From our point of view we are looking forward to following Gavin and Little Forest in the years to come.