Coming to grips with a large number of sites and huge amounts of content

Question

I've just been offered a fantastic but intimidating job opportunity and I wanted to know if anyone out there had any suggestions for handling the situation.

The issues are these:

• Trying to bring together large numbers of disparate sites maintained and updated by different people while nominally remaining under a single umbrella company.
• Massive amounts of content - not just across the sites as a whole but for individual sites.
• Technical differences between the people maintaining the various sites - some sites have an active and capable core team, others are maintained by people who can change static content but don't have any actual technical skills.

So the problems include (but aren't limited to) technical issues, people management, resource management and information architecture. I'm looking for any answers, suggestions, tools, techniques, examples or even anecdotes that might help make things more manageable.

Answer 1

Your question is kind of vague, but if I put myself in the situation you describe, here are some things I'd try to learn up front:

1. How many sites?
2. How many locations?
3. How many technologies?
4. Content priority / update frequency
5. Individual expertise / skill sets

Basically, you're not going to be able to corral all of those disparate sites and services unless you understand who is driving them, who is maintaining them, how frequently, and why?

You mentioned "bring together" and "information architecture", which leads me to believe you think you're going to be tasked with some level of integration. Can you elaborate on that?