Auditing your website content can seem an interminable task, but it’s long been regarded as an essential part of pre-redesign planning and content inventories are increasingly recognised as vital long-term tools for the effective management of web content.
If you’re just beginning to grapple with a content audit, below are some articles, books and example spreadsheets which you should find helpful.
Articles
Doing a Content Inventory, (Or, a Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey through your Web Site)
This short 2002 article by Jeffrey Veen is a good starting place for learning about content audits.
The Content Inventory: Roadmap to a Successful CMS Implementation
Article by Kassia Krozser which depicts content auditing as an essential part of a CMS implementation process. Helpfully points out that content inventories ‘almost always take longer than anticipated’.
Doing a Content Audit or Inventory
This blog post by Scott Baldwin includes some useful suggestions for applications which can speed up the auditing process by automating some of the listing process.
How to do a Content Audit
Hilary Marsh provides practical tips on content auditing, including advice to start at the highest levels of the site before working downwards and to be careful when ordering columns in Excel that you don’t just change the order of a single column.
A Map-Based Approach to a Content Inventory
Interesting article by Patrick C. Walsh, describing how he used Microsoft Access and Visio to create a maintainable site map and content inventory at the same time.
Why you shouldn’t start IA with a Content Inventory
A heretical article by Leisa Reichelt suggesting that starting redesign projects with a content inventory can be undesirable in that it immerses the designer in the existing way of doing things and constrains their ability to take a fresh approach. This provoked several responses, including an interesting rebuttal from Donna Spencer and The Rolling Content Inventory by Louis Rosenfeld, who champions content inventories as an ongoing process rather than a one-off exercise for redesign projects.
Books
Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Daniel M. Brown (Peachpit Press, 2007)
Contains a chapter on content inventories, with some helpful suggestions on formatting, linking an inventory into other website documentation and presenting the results of an inventory at meetings.
Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson (New Riders, 2009)
Has detailed practical advice about auditing content and tying the findings into an effective content strategy for your site.
Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley (New Riders, 2003)
A thorough treatment of all aspects of content management. The chapter that covers Performing a Content Audit is available free online.
Sample spreadsheets for content inventories
I’ve already mentioned Jeffrey Veen’s article Doing a Content Inventory, which has includes an Excel template for an inventory. It lists Page ID, Page Name, Link, Document Type, Topics, Owner, ROT (Redundant, Outdated or Trivial?) and Notes. It uses colour coding and indentation to reflect hierarchy.
Donna Spencer provides a simple content inventory spreadsheet on her blog. It includes fields for Navigation Title, Page Title, Files, Last Updated, Owner, Comments and whether the content needs to be deleted. Again, there’s use of indentation to indicate hierarchy and an example of freezing the Navigation Title column in Excel, so that it’s always visible as you scroll to the right – a nice technique to use for presenting large inventories.
Finally, the Seneb Consulting site has an example content inventory by Sarah A. Rice. It includes use of Excel’s Group and Outline features to allow the reader to expand and collapse groups of content, as well as instructions for using the Split Screen feature when dealing with larger inventories.
I think I’ve mentioned before how useful I find the lynda.com online training library. It’s always been a great resource for learning web design applications, but it also has an ever-increasing number of titles on other software and broader web-related topics. I’ve recently been watching one of the more recent additions: Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter by Anne-Marie Concepción.
The title provides a great introduction for complete newcomers to either social networking environment, but the course is sensibly structured so the starter videos on basic account set-up can be skipped by people who already have personal accounts. Setting up business accounts on Twitter and business pages on Facebook is then covered in full, with discussions and demonstrations of all the available functionality. Useful caveats are also provided when necessary. For example, you’re shown how to automatically import your blog into your Facebook page, but also warned why you probably don’t want to do this and given a sensible alternative.
The really valuable part of the title for many people will be its advice on using Twitter and Facebook strategically for business marketing, with special emphasis on increasing viral effects via ‘word of keyboard’.
For me some of the most interesting advice here included:
- Ways to cross-promote blog posts, Twitter feeds and Facebook pages.
- Advice on measuring the impact of Twitter and Facebook use – vital in a lot of business environments where the tools can be regarded as time-wasters.
- Tips on using Twitter, Facebook and companion tools like Tweetdeck to search for business opportunites and ideas.
- A useful breakdown of all the differences between pages and groups in Facebook – something I’ve never very clearly understood.
- Discussions of the terms of use for Twitter and Facebook. I hadn’t realised that Twitter forbids links in tweets to websites which are against its terms of service.
This is a fun title which is definitely worth a viewing if you’re a lynda.com subscriber with any interest in social marketing.
Social Media Marketing with Facebook and Twitter by Anne-Marie Concepción is available on the lynda.com training site.
Related posts
Review of WordPress.com Essential Training – another lynda.com title.
This is a neat little book on project management, which is ideal reading for web professionals acting as part-time project managers who don’t have time to read weightier tomes on the topic. As the title suggests, it contains 97 two-page essays from practitioners which are generally written in an engaging anecdotal style. It includes a useful index of tips by topic and quick explanations of project and technical terms at the bottom of pages, making it very accessible for newcomers to the subject. The focus is on IT projects in general, but lots of the tips are relevant to web-related projects.
Among the more useful areas covered for web project management are:
- An emphasis in several contributions on agile project development, involving frequent interaction with clients to evaluate features as they’re created.
- Reflections on the inevitability of scope change after requirements have been finalized and ways to deal with this. A good tip is provided on planning possible scope reductions from the beginning of a project in a controlled way by grading requirements according to their business value and the degree that they have dependencies for other requirements. The nice-to-haves with no dependencies are the obvious candidates for culling if necessary later on.
- Encouraging simple solutions over complex ones – including in code development.
- Finding alternatives to long pointless meetings – frequent instant ’standup’ meetings are recommended by several contributors.
97 Things Every Project Manager Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts is edited by Barbee Davis and published by O’Reilly.
Related posts
Free ebooks for web project management
Textual content is a red-headed stepchild when it comes to website design and development. It’s left to the last minute in site redesigns, viewed as a commodity by most site owners and as a simple item in a to-do list for UX designers. Website text is rarely approached correctly in web projects as a ‘complex, ever-evolving body of information which needs ongoing care and feeding’.
This is the striking viewpoint of Kristina Halvorson’s book on content strategy which lays bare the complexities of content production. She offers plenty of common-sense advice about how to build website text into a key business asset, keep control of it over the long term and set measurable objectives for success.
Key to this is developing an appreciation of the political nature of content, engaging with content providers and giving reviewers plenty of notice for their contributions. ‘Don’t leave content management to your CMS’ is the clear message. You need people for meaningful, actionable content and the key person required is someone in overall charge of content – an editor-in-chief empowered to say no to the business when necessary.
The content audit is thoroughly explored as a content management tool. There are useful practical tips here, such as using indented outline numbers in your audit documentation - 1.0, 1.1, 1.2 , etc – so you can easily link specific pieces of content to matching references in the site map and other documents later. There’s also an interesting discussion of the use of page tables for content planning and advice on how to include qualitative judgments in your audit as well as just conducting a quantitative analysis of content
There’s a whole chapter on content maintenance – a subject you rarely see people write much about. This advises developing a maintenance plan, having enforceable well-documented rules and using regularly-scheduled qualitative audits to question the ongoing purpose of each piece of content. The latter point draws on Gerry McGovern’s useful advice that all content ought to be regularly reviewed and removed if it’s not meeting a business objective or helping users achieve a task.
The book has a lively pugnacious style which makes it an easy read about a subject that could easily have come across as dull. The author makes a stack of suggestions which anybody working on websites could benefit from. However, reading it only confirmed my pre-existing assumption that content strategy can be a hard sell.
Improving the status of content creation in most organisations involves fighting against the general assumption of management that ‘anyone can write content’. Within the professional web world it’s up against the status of more exciting and saleable web disciplines in design and development and specialisms like SEO which contribute more transparently to improving the bottom line. In this context, long-term content maintenance is never going to be generally considered as important as implementing an exciting new content management system or launching a flashy new site design. Recognising the centrality of textual content to a successful web presence is therefore always going to be difficult to sell to a lot of organisations, but this book is one of the best pitches I’ve seen so far.
Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson is published by New Riders.
Related posts
Letting Go of the Words is another recommended book on writing for the web which I reviewed last year.
