Project
The Ontario government was decommissioning gov.on.ca, and the Ministry of Transportation had to move over more than 500 webpages to Ontario.ca in less than a year. The webpages also had to meet accessibility standards and follow the Ontario.ca style guide. Aside from having a lot of content to migrate and cut, the digital team at the time was predominately made up of coders. This made it challenging for MTO to meet the content requirements to finish the project.
Process & approach
With experience managing Ontario.ca pages for another ministry, I joined MTO’s digital team as their first web writer who also coded. Over the course of several months, our tiny team of 4 (2 writers, 2 developers) tackled this massive project on top of our day-to-day tasks. We negotiated content revisions with sometimes reluctant stakeholders, got multiple levels of approvals, built and published the webpages, and kept track of every website published to make sure redirects were set up. (Important when lots of other websites link to your site.)
I spent a summer writing (a career high). We borrowed writers from other teams. And when we could, we took down webpages that didn’t get much site traffic or showed an obvious need to exist. For information that couldn’t be removed, we merged it with existing pages to take up the least amount of web real estate as possible. The webpages were grouped under new topics such as road safety, emerging technology, and transportation planning to help users navigate the site.
Results & impact
Our team successfully completed the migration in time while also being one of the ministries that started really late. The 500+ webpages were reduced to 74. This made day-to-day maintenance more manageable, given how small the web team was. The quality of the writing improved. We were also able to centralize the digital content creation process through this project. Moving forward, MTO’s communications branch produced and managed their web content instead of being written and posted by other departments.
Writing samples
Electric kick-style scooters (e-scooters)
Large quadricycle pilot program
Driving near pedestrian crossovers and school crossings
Mimi Szeto 