While planning for an upcoming website redesign project, I sought advice on LinkedIn about the best way to conduct a content audit.
We were in the midst of a time-consuming, page-by-page evaluation of our site, which has more than 2,000 assets. Compared to many sites, that’s not very big. But it started to feel like a pretty big project about 500 pages later. In addition to a cataloging the pages, we were making an effort to determine when they had been last updated and other important information, like whether they were ROT (redundant, outdated, or trivial.) I’m happy to say we did not have too many in that category. Still, I wondered whether there was a better way and whether we were doing everything we could to plan for the upcoming redesign.
That’s where my colleagues at LinkedIn came in.
After posting a question about this in the Content Wranglers group on LinkedIn, I received numerous recommendations, including one from fellow content wrangler Sarah Lea, a senior developer for Hull City Council in Yorkshire, England. Lea recommended an article by Alice Ainsworth, who is part of a small e-communications team at Southwark Council in London. Ainsworth manages the council’s corporate site, the intranet, and their social media channels, among other responsibilities. Ainsworth notes in her post that migrating content can be an intimidating task. Her content migration project started in August 2009 and the new site was launched in March 2010.
She recommends creating a spreadsheet with all of the content including information on folder structure, creation dates and review dates, and content owners. Her next piece of advice? “Cut the crap.” Using Google Analytics, they found that just 30 pages accounted for almost half of the page views on their site. After doing that review, they cut their live pages by 20 percent. Her next step was to do some detailed information architecture planning based on their review. Her excellent advice includes this: “I don’t believe anyone else should dictate your IA – it needs to be tailored to your local community, focusing on local priorities and using the language of your residents not central government.” She also says, “You can’t put lipstick on a pig! Allow enough time for internal quality checks of the content before going live. No one will care about a new design etc if the content is rubbish.”
I couldn’t agree more, Alice.
For more good advice from Alice, you can read her post.
To read more about content audits and advice I received from fellow Content Wranglers on LinkedIn, go to this page.
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