#content inventory

In this guide, we’ll walk you through the UX Content Audit Definition, its benefits, provide an actionable step-by-step approach, and suggest the best tools to help you execute it seamlessly. Let’s discover as below!

Today I finished the last of the content inventories and audits, which included

Content inventory of my client’s website

Analysis of content inventory

Content audit of my client’s website

Multichannel audit of my client’s touchpoints (only some touchpoints, not all)

Competitor audit

Yesterday I (finally!) finished the content inventory of my client’s website.

I am still amazed at how long the inventory actually took. I expected it to take a week, maybe a little more given time constraints on my schedule, but it ended up actually taking three weeks to complete. The fact that the inventory took so long actually helped me to understand why all the books on content strategy explicitly state the importance of planning enough time for each section of a project. Underestimating how much time it will take to complete a section of a project can only hurt you in the long run.

Over the past week or so, I have begun to work on the content inventory. And what an experience it has been so far. This project is the first time I have ever attempted an inventory for a more extensive website, and I fully understand why doing an inventory on an enterprise scale can take weeks. Just doing the inventory of my client’s website is taking a bit longer than I thought it was going to.

For this part of the project I chose to do two things: 

have an inventory tool crawl the site, and

conduct a manual inventory of the site.

Inventories For the website crawl, I used the CAT (Content Analysis Tool) recommended in Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook by Paula Ladenburg Land. As of this moment, the tool will be most useful for images of the current website, as one of the features of the tool is that it screenshots every page of a site it crawls. So, in the future when I need images of the current website, I won’t have to screenshot them myself.

For the manual inventory of the site, I consulted Content Strategy For the Web by Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach, Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide by Kevin P. Nichols, and The Web Content Strategist’s Bible by Richard Sheffield. After looking at each of their sections on inventories, I came up with the following main columns for my own content inventory spreadsheet:

ID #

Title (usually the title of the webpage)

Content Type (text, link, image, webpage, etc.)

Content Description

Content Owner or Author

Storage Location

Last Updated

Update Frequency (daily, monthly, as needed, rarely, never, unknown)

Metadata (yes, no, unknown)

Metadata Keywords

Notes

Although I am still inventorying the site, I have already learned some very valuable information regarding the current set up of the website.

There are no landing pages for six of the main product categories.

The content on product pages is inconsistent. For example, some pages have a (limited) size description, while others don’t have a size description at all.

There are multiple pages for the same product. For example, one dress has 10 different pages dedicated to it, which are split up by size and color. (At this time, I don’t know if this is an issue that will be able to be fixed, since I don’t currently know the reason for this set up.)

I currently do not know the last updated date or update frequency for any page of the site. For some of the pages, such as the home page, I have been entering how often I believe the page is updated, even though I don’t really know that information yet.

The hours of operation are buried in the “Location” page, which can only be accessed by scrolling to the footer of the website and clicking on the link underneath the “Quick Links” section.

Although the business does have a return policy, it will more than likely need to be rewritten and reformatted to make it easier to read and of more use to the intended audience.

As was the case with Nichols’s book on Enterprise Content Strategy, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook by Paula Ladenburg Band is a short book that packs a huge punch.

In short, the book goes over what content inventories and audits are and how to go about completing them. This book will be a go-to resource when I begin Phase Two for a number of reasons.

Introduced me to an automated inventory program: the Content Analysis Tool (CAT). I had planned to do a manual inventory of my client’s website; however, after browsing through what the CAT can do, I believe I will let create and inventory for me, and then go from there. This tool could end up saving me hours of tedious spreadsheet work that could be better spent moving forward with the project.

Gave me an excellent primer on what I need to do and what information I need to know before starting the audit, including an excellent section of stakeholder interviews. (Pages 31-39)

Went over several types of audits, some of which I had not even thought of before.

Multichannel: As I talked about in my post on my first client meeting, taking into account the number of content channels my client uses will be essential to this project.

Personas & Customer Journey: Although creating personas and a detailed customer journey could end up being outside the scope of this project, this chapter gave me some great questions that I could take into account in other ways.

Content Quality

Content Effectiveness

Competitor Audit

Legal: Before reading this chapter, I had honestly not even thought about what legal issues or requirements might be important or relevant to my client’s business. After reading it, however, I realized that I need to fully understand how my client treats copyright, if she has a privacy policy & terms of use, and how she treats user-generated content. Those last two areas are particularly important, since my client collects data on her customers (i.e. addresses, credit card information, phone numbers, etc.) and uses social media outlets to promote her business.

Finally, as someone who is a perfectionist and who loves to do research, this book left me with a call-to-action that I don’t intend to forget:

But, to quote a well-known sporting goods company, at some point you need to just do it. Jump in, learn, refine your process. Do it again. Your circumstances dictate how you conduct your content analysis activities, so adapt and modify what you’ve learned here to your situation. Then share your experience with the community so that we can all continue to learn and develop our skills.