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:
Title (usually the title of the webpage)
Content Type (text, link, image, webpage, etc.)
Update Frequency (daily, monthly, as needed, rarely, never, unknown)
Metadata (yes, no, unknown)
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.