How Sitemorse leverages the power of prioritisation to return time to you

Digital managers and their teams are busy. Really busy. They simply don’t have all the hours in the day to carry out every task they are asked to do would like to do. And because they are often just one or two people and not everyone appreciates how they work, it means their colleagues don’t always understand just how busy they are.

The wider digital and content team – often people responsible for writing and maintaining a section of pages or microsite – are equally busy, with website or content commitments a peripheral activity within their normal, full-time role.

Why Sitemorse always returns time to digital teams

We realised this early on when developing the Sitemorse platform. For our product to be successful we had to make sure it saved precious time for digital managers and to the wider content team.  And the one thing that it absolutely had to avoid doing was adding any unnecessary time, because digital managers don’t have any unnecessary time to give away.

Why you get less done with other services

Our core design principle of saving time differentiates us from our competitors. For example, one key competitor offers a pretty comprehensive, mature product, but digital teams upgrading to Sitemorse are surprised to find they end up getting far more done because of the way we’ve designed our product. Running compliance checks across the entire website every five days and then delivers a list of every single issue to fix and task that needs to be done - there is limited value in keep checking pages that people don't visit for instance.

In our view, this is not the best approach for three key reasons:

1.     It’s too much information

Just processing and digesting the list of everything that needs to be done takes a considerable amount of time. Reading the report, working out the priorities and organising who needs to do what and when, is a significant and time-draining exercise. And that’s before you’ve made any site improvements!

2.     It’s overkill

Running reports over the whole site every five days is simply unnecessary. Most web content – particularly at lower levels of your site - is relatively static and doesn’t change. Yes, you need to do a whole site review every now and then, but its overkill to be told about the issues on your whole site, especially if you haven’t got the time to make all the fixes. Very minor issues on lower-level, less important and less visited pages may not warrant such regular, comprehensive testing.

3.     It’s unhelpful

For digital managers (and then content owners) who are already struggling with their workload it is not particularly helpful and can even be demoralising to provide a massive list of things to do, especially if you then repeat this exercise every five days! Sometimes less gets achieved when it doesn’t feel achievable.

The net impact of this is less gets done because teams waste time reading the report, start to ignore things because they’ve heard it before, don’t have time to implement the changes, and feel like site improvement is impossible anyway!

The power of prioritisation

Sitemorse takes a very different approach. Following our principle of returning you time, we focus on testing just the most important, priority pages. We work out which pages to test intelligently – using a smart algorithm which considers the position of your page in your site hierarchy, how recently it has been edited, and the number of visitors it gets. After the testing we then automatically notify your individual content editors the top priority fixes from the most important pages, based on the severity or urgency of the issue. No long list to sift through, no huge list of content editors for you to notify, no mountain to climb.

By leveraging the power of prioritisation, content editors are given a far more manageable and realistic set of tasks to complete that they are far more able to slot into their working day.  The fixes will also be the ones that really need addressing.

Your content owners get links to these ten priority issues – they can follow the link and make the fix. (Soon they’ll also be able to watch a relevant instructional video too.) More gets done because the insights received are instantly actionable, are highly relevant and don’t zap your energy.

Over time as more site issues are addressed, your lower pages will start to appear as priority items. You can also instruct Sitemorse to test specific areas of the site. Through a natural combination of prioritisation, co-ordination from you and your content community learning to maintain better content standards, you will rapidly end up with complete site improvement.

Get in touch

If you’re using a different product and it’s not returning valuable time to you or your content community, then Sitemorse is for you. Get in touch if you’d like to find out more about the product and our approach. You can even sign up and give Sitemorse a try yourself. Then you can start to work out what you can do with the time you’ve saved.