Website Architecture Planning | Content Inventory

Searching a website for specific words can be a helpful way to find the information you need quickly. Whether looking for a particular product, article, or information, using the proper techniques can help you locate it quickly and easily.

There will be times when you need access to a website when you do not have access to the internet. Or, you want to make a backup of your own website but the host that you are using does not have this option. Maybe you want to use a popular website for reference when building your own, and you need 24/7 access to it. Whatever the case may be, there are a few ways that you can go about downloading an entire website to view at your leisure offline. Some websites won't stay online forever, so this is even more of a reason to learn how to download them for offline viewing. These are some of your options for downloading a whole website so that it can be viewed offline at a later time, whether you are using a computer, tablet, or smartphone. Here are the best Website Download Tools for downloading an entire website for offline viewing.

What is a Content Inventory?

A content inventory is a comprehensive list of your content that has been organized within a spreadsheet or software. Using this, you can plan the content of a brand new website or improve upon an existing one. When you are in the midst of a website redesign or migration, a content inventory will collect more information to add to the initial list of files on the inventory. The program that you are using, such as DYNO Mapper, can accommodate more columns of data as they become available. The way that the data is organized will depend on the structure of the website and its navigational model. Content inventory is also used for tracking content through different systems. Additionally, use a content inventory to guide how each web page will be rebuilt when undergoing a redesign. When you choose to perform a content inventory, you are actively taking stock of what items are contained on a website, leading to a successful content audit.

The key to maintaining website content successfully is the duty of understanding what your assets are. In short, your content is your assets. There are so many ways of understanding the technology that is behind running a website, but what you have as the inventory is the main way to realize what exactly it is that the technology delivers—the content. A quantitative content inventory is the document that will list all of the website's pages and the data about those pages. This type of content inventory is no doubt time-consuming, but it is a practice that yields much rewards to website managers, information architects, website designers, and content strategists.

It is highly likely that your business is facing a challenge with content. It could be a layout that hides important information, or a navigation arrangement that does not support customer services or purchases. Useful content may be buried too soon after it is posted before you are able to maximize its true potential. Or, less successful content does not become archived quick enough and ends up irrelevant to the audience but stays prominent on the website. These types of content problems are not only hard on you personally, but they become hard on your brand financially. Choosing to complete a content inventory is vital as a preliminary step to take control of the existing burden of current content, and will allow your brand to implement a content strategy that is influential.