Between the garden in our front window and the indoor plants we water on our desk or in our office, we find ourselves becoming gardeners. 

And you know what? Your website is a garden, too. 

Your organization, your team, or even just you, built your website. You invest time, resources, and expertise in crafting content, adding images, and reflecting your brand and mission in a way that accurately represents what you offer to people who need you.

Plants, fields, and gardens are much the same. Time, effort, resources, and expertise contribute to creating a beautiful landscape.

On the web, we refer to the act of gardening as governance. 

Why governance (and gardening) matter

Lisa Welchman, author of Managing Chaos: Digital Governance by Design, defines governance as a framework for establishing accountability, roles, and decision-making authority for an organization’s digital presence.

When we redesign our websites, we get the whole team together and tackle it at once, using all our tools. 

But redesigns can’t be done every time a problem arises. And user-centered research – one of the most crucial parts of any redesign – frequently gets left behind. 

According to a State of UX 2022 report by UserZoom, companies that wanted to do user research couldn’t for these reasons, with those surveyed reporting:

• 55% time constraints
• 44% budget constraints
• 44% resource constraints
• 28% lack of stakeholder buy-in

However, 70% of the surveyed companies say the demand for user experience (UX) has increased, even though their budgets have remained the same.

So what can we do?

Give your website tender, loving care (TLC), just like a garden. Content gardening helps you and your team stay on top of the weeds and make small improvements over time. 

Create a website mission statement (plan the landscape)

Who’s your content for? What’s it meant to do? A core strategy statement, or a website mission statement, should answer that for you.

Core strategy statements identify your target audiences, content attributes, purpose, and key actions or outcomes the audience should take. You can actually start it with a Mad Lib.

The content we produce for [website] helps reach [audience(s)] by providing [adjective, adjective] content that will [ideal action].

Our content should [purpose] and help audiences feel [adjective, adjective] so they can [audience goal].

Revisit this statement often. Use it to kick off website improvement or review meetings, use it with stakeholders when fielding requests or needs, and keep it at the core of your work. 

Make it the “live, laugh, love” flag in your garden.

Audit your website (survey and weed)

Your website is never done. It’s a hard truth. And my garden, or your garden, isn’t done, either.

Every so often, I check the soil of my indoor plants. I check the mulch in my garden. I prune the branches of the hydrangea tree every year and pull out the dead stalks of prairie grass so more blooms can come in.

Your website needs the same care. 

You need to validate the symptoms of your website’s weak points, just like you evaluate soil, shade, and water access for a garden. 

Ideally, you should review your website content at least on a quarterly basis. If that’s too tall an order, aim for twice a year. 

Content audits are essential to understanding and analyzing:

• What content you have
• How it’s performing
• If it’s meeting your brand’s voice, tone, and style
• If it’s useful to your audience
• If it’s leading to desired actions

At a baseline, your audit should answer what content to:

• Keep
• Edit or refresh
• Delete or archive
• Combine or consolidate

A method for this is the ROT method. Another great gardening word. Is the content redundant, outdated, or trivial? If any of those (or goodness, all three) - it’s time to weed it out.

See how others are doing it (visit other gardens)

Need inspiration? 

It doesn’t hurt to visit other gardens or websites. How is your neighbor tending to their lilacs? Tulips? In the case of websites, how is a competitor or peer displaying or representing a set of content similar to yours?

You might not find inspiration at all, but be encouraged to strive for better content nonetheless. And that’s OK! You might also find someone using imagery, content layout, features, or language style in a way you want to emulate.

Think about user-first (human-centered) design. As a user of the web yourself, what helps you navigate the web, buy a product, or complete a task? 

Known as Jakob’s Law, user experience expert Jakob Nielsen says:

“Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.”

That includes all of us, right? So what makes the web enjoyable for you? What makes it enjoyable for friends and family? And most importantly, your users?

Refresh your content (transplant the flowers)

Sometimes your plants and flowers need to be relocated. The soil might have changed, or maybe it needs more sun. You dig it up, maybe divide the roots, and you find a more suitable home and ready soil to help it grow.

Your content needs this, too.

Over time, it’s easy for your website to become a filing cabinet of meeting agendas, documents, and pages of content that were written in pristine condition but haven’t been touched in months. 

It happens, we get it. 

But that’s why gardening is so crucial. Take a look at your content with a discernible eye. 

• Is it still serving your audience? Your core mission?
• Does it meet your core strategy statement values?
• Is it even being visited?
• Is the content readable? Accessible? Written in a plain language that’s easy to understand and translate into other languages?

Metrics like Google Analytics can tell you a lot, but so can talking to your front-line teams who field emails and phone calls from people who use your services.

Don’t tackle the whole website at once. Start small. One section, even one page at a time, can help you find a rhythm for asking these questions and adjusting. 

Set goals for your content (monitor your plants)

No matter what you do with your content—whether it stays the same over time or gets updated often—keep an eye on its health with measurable goals.

SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) goals are a great way to identify how you want your page to perform. 

Is that flower blooming like it should? Are that plant’s leaves staying healthy in the hot weather of summer? Gardeners ask themselves these things all the time.

Your content can be measured in various ways using different tools. And you don’t necessarily have to be an analytics whiz to do it. Consider this breakdown:

There are plenty of other questions to ask—real questions, with real value—to help you measure your content and identify its faults and opportunities. Likewise, they’re helpful ways to measure what’s working well.

Talk to real people

To best understand the value of your webpages, talk to real users of your site. Ask them:

• Does this content make sense to you?
• What do you look for on our website? Do you find it?
• What’s easy for you to do on our website?
• What’s difficult for you to do on our website?
• Is there information you wish we had, but we don’t have today?
• What would make your experience as a visitor better?

Instead of gathering people into a focus group, you can apply this process using online surveys. Surveys can open up a whole host of feedback (for better or worse), but often result in real answers and concerns that you can address over time.

When it’s time, redesign (burn down the prairie)

In many parts of the United States, the land was once a prairie. Wide swaths of green patches of land with deep-rooted blooms and grasses that retain flooded rain water, keep the ground fresh, and feed the creatures and animals that call the prairie home.

And, thankfully, many prairies remain under the watchful eye of natural resource teams and agencies.

But every summer, before humans were here to tend to it, wildfires would wipe out the prairies, stripping them to the ground for the winter. The ash enriched the soil, allowing for regrowth the following season.

It’s easy to see where this is going.

As the needs of our audiences and industry change, so must our websites. While regular gardening and content monitoring and refreshing are valuable, you might need to redesign. 

And that’s okay, too.

So you build a case. You find a team. You gather your resources and make time to start the prairie burn, and find people who’ll help you rebuild it stronger and better. 

If this sounds like something you need, Lullabot can help. From full website replatforms and designs to content improvement to technical maintenance, we’re here.

We’re great website gardeners with green thumbs.