New Drupal implementation: Pitfalls?

We migrated to Drupal 3 years ago. When we did that, we culled out about a third of our old site content and migrated the rest. We've spent the last 3 years culling out more content, organizing it better and pushing key content.

One thing that has helped is to have a designated content editor who can review all new and revised pages while she goes through legacy content. She is the keeper of the editorial styles.

We also are stingy in handing out permissions to update pages. Pretty much nobody but core editorial staff creates new pages, but we allow trusted others to edit existing pages.

Identifying and grooming key contributors is important. We have many employees that would love to be able to edit pages, but their writing skills or restraint in creating redundant content give us pause. Working with a few individuals, refining the education process and adding a few more people seems to work well.

We also found that we need about half the workflows we thought we did. Doing things online instead of however you did it before makes some steps redundant.

Are you getting a theme and going from there, or are you paying someone to build it and taking it over from there?

We established departmental content contribution teams, headed by one key contact person in each department who was an editor. We have monthly (every other month in summer) content contributor meetings where I review some web-related topic, from content tagging to working with images and writing for the web. These help users feel connected and informed and help me reinforce style guides, content curation and encourage those who are going above and beyond.

We use the Workflow and Revisioning modules, and have ~20 active content contributors at this point. New page content & new document collections go through webadmin (that's me) review before publication, and it gives me a chance to work with content contributors one-on-one to discuss content strategy, their intended audience for the content, and how/where content should be cross-linked and re-purposed.

The biggest issue for us has been that building pages in "chunks" that can be re-used is fundamentally different way of thinking about content then thinking in terms of "pages". We have standardized templates for pages, so links to external sites go here, key documents go there, etc. It makes for a much more consistent presentation, and reduces maintenance (change a person's email address in one place and it's changed everywhere), but requires staff to plan and think about building pages "Lego-style". It's not as intuitive as they would like and although we work hard to make it as easy as possible it still requires ongoing training, thought, planning, and documentation.

Wow! I really agree with everyone here.

Open Public is a very well build distribution aimed at the local government (full disclosure: we are in contract with Phase2, the creator). Workflow is also essential in today's environment. I am also amazed at how fast the culture changes. A few months ago, we were still blocking access to social media county wide and arguing about open source.

Now, it seems everyone gets it. We have a vibrant facebook page, colleagues understand the need for a new way of publishing information with content first.
With more people active online, it seems the content management aspect becomes less of a training hurdle if it becomes as easy to update your site as to update your facebook page...

When it comes to blocks, I also agree we need to educate about the modular flexibility of blocks (like legos). Our designers have introduced the idea of element collages (buttons, search, navigation item, titles..). Separating wireframes and design elements that can be used and reused in different areas of the page.

We are also looking at migrating the minimum. We'll start light and go from there.