Anyone who has ever suffered through a migraine knows the symptoms: headache, distorted vision, irritability, dizziness, nausea, etc. Anyone who has ever gone through a website content migration has probably experienced some of these same symptoms.

Whether we all like it or not, in the world of digital media content migration is a necessary evil. Actually, strike that, it is a necessary good. Without the ability to perform a migration, all content would have to be manually copied from the current content management system (CMS) or entered manually into the new system.

As with migraines, the key to a headache-free migration is prevention. The most important preventative steps are to understand:

• how your content is represented in the source system;
• how you would like it represented in the destination system; and
• how you will you need to process or transform the content while moving it.

Once you have defined these three points in detail, you have essentially defined your migration path.

We recently performed a migration for a client and, while considering the above steps, determined some other things you might want to consider:

• images, documents, and other static assets;
• comments to any posts or articles you’d like to preserve;
• users (site users, bloggers, comment authors, etc);

With careful planning and a well-considered migration path, a lot of work (and headaches) can be avoided.

Know the tell-tale signs. If you are changing domains, hosting providers, or replacing your CMS, you may be headed for a migration. If you feel the onset of a migration, don’t panic. Seek professional help. You don’t have to go through it alone.