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Conduct a Content inventory
- What is a content inventory?
- Why conduct a content inventory?
- What goes into a content inventory?
- How do you create a content inventory?
- How do you organize a content inventory?
- What do you do with a content inventory?
What is a content inventory?
A content inventory is a list of all the content on your site.
If you are revising a Web site, start with a content inventory of what is now on the site. Then, use your Web site requirements to create a planned content inventory for the new version of the site.
If you are developing a new site, of course, you will only have the planned content inventory.
Why conduct a content inventory?
In any situation, you have to know what you are working with. The content (the information) is what your site offers to your users. You have to know what you are now offering and decide whether each piece of it is still needed; still accurate; and still written in the right level of detail, the right tone, and the right language for your users.
Many Web sites grow by accretion. People keep adding pages to the Web site, but few pages ever get taken away. After a while, if you don't keep a content inventory, no one knows what is on the site. It could have outdated and inaccurate information. It could have pages that contradict each other. It is very hard to maintain a site if you don't have a content inventory.
If you are developing a new site, setting up a content inventory at the beginning puts you on a good path. If you keep up the inventory as the site matures, you will continue to know what is on the site, how old each page is, when each page has been revised or needs to be reviewed, and so on.
What goes into a content inventory?
If you use a content management system, it may help you with your content inventory and offer you a database of categories like those we suggest here.
Otherwise, use a spreadsheet or a database application for your content inventory because you should have at least this information about every page in your site:
- the overall topic or area to which the page belongs
- the page title
- the URL
- a short description of the information on the page
- when the page was first written
- the date of the last revision
- who wrote the page (if you know it)
- who is responsible for the page now and that person's contact information
- when the page must be reviewed next
- the expiration date ofthe page (if there is one)
- other pages that this page links to
- the page's status—which we explain in the next paragraph
Status: Use this category to keep track of progress in revising or developing the content for your site. If you are revising a site, you can use this category to indicate whether a page is fine to keep, needs to be deleted, needs to be revised, is being revised, etc. If you are developing a new site or new content, you can use this category to indicate how far along a particular page is: planned, being written, being edited, in review, ready for posting, or posted.
How do you create a content inventory?
For an existing site, you can get a list of all the URLs on the site from the server. If your agency's or department's Web site is not all on one server, be sure to go through each server whose information is going to be part of the new site.
You can also use the site's site map, if it has one, to get started. But many site maps do not list all the pages on a site. They only give top level ones or major topics.
You can also go through the site, page by page, starting with the home page and following links, although that method may be too unsystematic to find all the pages on the site—and some pages may in fact not be connected through the home page.
If you are using a content management system, you may be able to generate a report to help generate a content inventory.
How do you organize a content inventory?
If you use a spreadsheet or database, you can sort the inventory by any of the categories of information you have. The primary category might be by overall topic or area so that you can see all the pages that relate to the same information.
You may also want to sort by date of last update so that you can view all of the old content on the site and review these pages to determine if they need updating.
What do we do with a content inventory?
As you can see from the list of categories, you can use the content inventory to get a handle on what is on the site and what needs to be done to different parts of the site. For a new site, you can use the planned content inventory to keep track of the developing site.
In a huge site, you probably want to have a team of people working with the content inventory, assigning sections of it to different managers. (If you do that, you might want to add a category to indicate who the manager is for each page.)
Use the content inventory to work with page owners (and/or their managers) to decide what pages should be dropped, what pages need to be revised, what content is missing and needs to be written. For a new site, use the planned content inventory as a way of building the content for the site in a controlled and methodical way.
A content inventory must be dynamic. Someone must be in charge of keeping it up to date. If you are working with a content management system, you may be able to set privileges so that specific people keep up specific parts of the inventory. You may also be able to set the system to notify content owners when their pages must be reviewed. If you are using a newly constructed spreadsheet or database, someone must be assigned to maintain it; and you must have a way of submitting changes to that person.
Next steps
Once you have created a content inventory, you are ready to Define the Navigation for your Web site. You may want to Perform a Card Sort to learn how actual users organize the content on on your Web site.
