#assess phase

[tabithaakinscapstone]

Content Inventory Complete!

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.

One good thing that came out of the inventory taking so long, is that I really feel like I have an intimate understanding of my client’s website. I am hopeful that because I already have a pretty decent understanding of the site and it’s issues after spending so much time with the site over the past few weeks, that it will make the audit process move a little more quickly. Beginning that audit process and analyzing the content inventory spreadsheet will be my main priorities as I move into the month of November.

[tabithaakinscapstone]

Content Inventory

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.

Moving Forward While the inventory does seem to be taking a bit longer than I thought, it is already showing me valuable information and where I will need to focus my energies moving forward. My hope is to finish up the manual inventory this week and then move on to the auditing process at the end of October.

[tabithaakinscapstone]

Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide - Kevin P. Nichols

Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide by Kevin P. Nichols is a short book, but boy does it pack a punch. This book is not even 150 pages, but it gave me an excellent primer on what it takes to institute a content strategy at an enterprise level.

While my capstone doesn’t require me to work at an enterprise level, I still plan to model the phases of this project and its deliverables after those used at the enterprise level, which is why I chose to read it in the first place.

Although the book will be an excellent resource throughout the project, for the moment, Nichols’s emphasis on governance and his chapter on the assess phase of the project will be the most helpful.

Governance One of the more interesting aspects of this book is that Nichols puts governance at the center of a content strategy. Usually governance concerns seem to be left until the very end of a content strategy or project; however, Nichols believes that “governance drives your content strategy” (123) and that it should be one of your earliest concerns in any project. I’ve always believed that governance was of utmost importance to a project, so it was nice to read that a content strategy professional believes so as well. Moving forward with this project, I will definitely be placing governance concerns at the forefront.

Assess Phase Although I will not formally start this phase of my capstone until October, Nichols’s chapter on the assess phase will prove itself to be helpful starting later today. In this chapter, Nichols spends over 10 pages discussing stakeholder interviews, and gives an extensive list of questions that should be considered when you begin to assess the state of your content. Many of the questions Nichols’s puts forth in this section I had never even thought about asking, but after reading them, I see how getting the answers to them are so important to starting off any content strategy project. As I conduct my first client meeting later today, and conduct others in the future, I will be drawing on this section heavily.

Overall, I found this book to be very enlightening and will more than likely draw on it frequently as I complete my capstone.