Using Jira and Confluence to create website content

Did you think Confluence and Jira were just for web developers? Think again!

Any kind of collaborative project can benefit from the powerful scheduling, issue tracking and documentation features in Confluence and Jira. If your organisation is already using the Atlassian stack, then it’s time to get even more out of it.

Let’s show you how you can use Jira and Confluence to create the content for your website; better than you’ve ever been able to do it before.

1 – Set goals

First, you need to know what your content is for. You can’t just blindly make content for the sake of it and expect it to succeed. You have to define what success is, and work towards it.

Read more: How to set goals: think SMART

Each goal has to be specific and quantifiable – not a vague, unachievable ambition like “get more video views” or “make it better for SEO”. What does “more” or “better” mean?

Instead, try goals like “get 10,000 video views in 12 months” and “double our organic search traffic year on year”: tangible, specific targets. Then, you can start working out how to achieve them.

It takes multiple creative and strategic disciplines to make web content that works towards these goals – and setting, tracking and checking off goals with multiple teams can get tricky. But by using Confluence, you can clearly add goals as a reminder in the project overview – so everyone knows why they’re doing what they’re doing.

2 – Project planning

Now that you have goals, it’s time to roadmap them and determine your team’s workflow. The project lead should be able to set mini-goals that form part of the larger objective – using simple project planning tools like Atlassian’s Trello.

During the process, managers can identify bottlenecks or adjust goals in order to make them achievable, realistic or change their time constraints – but none of that will be possible without first having the plan written out in a collaborative workspace.

The roadmap should include regular check-ins to get progress updates and make notes. Integration with Confluence can make this roadmap (and all knowledge gained during the project) freely available to the relevant teams at the point of need.

3 – Assemble your team

Now you know what you need to achieve, and how you’re going to get there, you need to gather your team.

By creating a collaboration space in Confluence, your team can be assembled from anywhere in the world – so even outsourced work can be included in your central project management tool.

Read more: Looking for a Confluence contractor to help set you up?

Work can be delegated to the right team from here: SEOs and digital marketers can identify targets and popular content topics, while the copywriters start producing headlines and text in response to the research. Graphic designers, developers, videographers and photographers can be booked in or sourced for further assets that are vital to the project.

Now that we have the blueprint and the team, we can start building.

4 – Start building content to your architecture

Once drafted and sourced, all your web content assets can be assembled in a working “proto-website”, within Confluence. This means that your website structure, user journey and CTAs can all be built out, tested and progressed – without any additional burden on your dev team, or the need for a staging website in the early stages of development.

Confluence is very easy to use, similar to an all-in-one website building platform. It allows for easy version tracking, so testing and rolling back is super simple. Plus, migrating to the live site is greatly streamlined as Confluence can export HTML and XML files.

5 – Use Jira to make improvements after launch

Buggy interface? Typos? Pages loading slowly? Your team can create tickets in Jira, giving all issues a clear path to resolution. Issues with content itself can be flagged in Jira and tasked to the right person, while any dev improvements can be allocated to the development team and tracked to completion.

As your company progresses and the offering evolves, the user journey may become more obvious. Using Jira to highlight areas to improve the journey, and then writing and arranging the new structure in Confluence gives teams total flexibility and ownership of their successes – even after launch.

Get deeper control of Confluence and Jira

Need deeper control in Confluence and Jira, for software development and content creation? ClearHub specialises in finding the best Atlassian contractors, to develop custom Confluence and Jira DevOps solutions.

Want to know more? Get in touch with the ClearHub team today – call +44 (0) 2381 157811 or send your message to info@clearhub.tech.