The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning - Page 21

A proper website redesign or content management system’s restructuring project starts with a comprehensive content audit. Creating an inventory requires profound understanding, especially about the target audience and the expected outcome. Before you start working on your content inventory, it is important to understand the following factors.

Understand Your Audience

What is the purpose of your cataloging activity? Who is going to use the information you are gathering and how will it influence decisions based on the data like number of pages, images, videos, interactive features like forms and logins, among others. Will the content inventory be followed by a comprehensive content audit to convince your company’s management that indeed the content meets the business needs or the website is in dire need of a complete overhaul? If this is the case, then you need to pay more attention to the content’s scope especially the structuring on how content pieces relate with each other.

What Is the Objective?

Understanding the inventorying objective is very important. Are you an information architect trying to understand the overall content structure, grouping and classification, number of interaction models or templates? Do you have content buried in fourth-level pages that can only be navigated through a text link? If this is the case, you sure will want to start by viewing the file organized into a sitemap showing navigational models and your site’s hierarchy and search for discrepancies and patterns.

On the other hand, if you are a content strategist, is inventorying meant to prepare you for a content audit? Other than the website’s structure, you sure will want to assess various types of content, their numbers and types. Do you find the website rich with marketing copy but very little informational content? You sure will want to understand the publishing process; who creates, uploads and manages content and if there is need for migration. Base your decisions on the messaging, consistency, clarity and other qualitative content aspects.

For site managers, they may just want to understand the website’s performance, find out if there are any orphaned pages, duplicate or outdated content or some broken links. If you are preparing for content migration, you need to carefully identify what needs to be migrated and what shouldn’t. You sure will want to map the inventory against SEO guidelines and Google analytics.

What Is Your Timeline?

What is the long-term plan for the content inventory data? For migration, you may need at least one year based on the content size. During this period, what changes do you expect from the content? Do you really have to carry out a page-by-page audit or a general catalogue will be just fine? Most of these decisions will also be determined by the type of website. E-commerce sites change more often, and the databases drive the content and therefore there is no need to capture all the URLs because they are likely to change and your scoping efforts will be skewed if you choose to count each product page as an independent page to migrate and create.

Understanding your goals will go a long way in ensuring that you capture the right kind of information and enable you use the information appropriately. Cataloging is just a step to the right direction, but it is important that you invest more time analyzing the data, which can be done with the help of DYNO Mapper content inventory tools.

Before embarking on a content inventory and audit process, it is recommended to base the actual work on an existing template. There are many examples online that you can borrow from so long as you get the methodology right. If you use DYNO Mapper’s content inventory, you may not have any reason to find some template because our tool’s dashboard is loaded with all relevant information. Therefore, in case you choose to export a crawl’s result, you already have your hands on the basics in the export, just open it in Excel and you will have a working inventory template that you can supplement with the information you want to track.

Content Inventory

When our tool crawls your website, it will fetch and show the following information, carefully sorted and organized for your review;

• URL
• File type
• Level
• Date
• Meta title
• Description
• Keywords
• List of all images on every page
• List of all audio and video files on every page
• Each page’s document list
• List of inbound and outbound links to each page

For your convenience, you can include Google Analytics in the job set up like page views, bounce, among others. With all the above information, you are ready to start the audit

Auditing with DYNO Mapper

Based on the size, complexity and length of the content project, it is possible to commence the auditing process straight from the interface. You can easily identify some of the common issues you would like to dig deeper into. Look at the detail view, mainly the summary of the types of content that may lead to various questions and conclusions. You can also use the detail view to sieve and identify specific types of content or sort out based on the status codes to spot broken (404) pages or redirects, which is important for SEO. Upon viewing the comprehensive list, you can identify and filter the URL, format, the site level of every page and title. If you find a blank title file, then you sure have come across a page without its Meta title, you should add.

Inventory Details Page

Move to the page containing the details for the specifics about each page; it is here you will find all the metadata like the title, the description, keywords, various clickable lists of video, audio, images and document files connected with the page. Scrutinize the metadata and compare them against the website’s standards, spot pages without images and decide whether to add them, check the links and decide if more cross-linking strategy is necessary. Using the notes section, make your comments regarding the page or monitor the content owners, types of content and review the statuses.

Export your Audit

In case you would like to include additional information so as to finalize the audit process, you can with ease export the results to an Excel file. Consider the following.

• URL: Review the URL structure to understand the length and clarity for both search engines optimization as well as human readability. Long URLs are not recommended because they may not be rendered by some browsers and humans may not remember them. Avoid multiple parameters in URLs.
• Navigational Structure: Use the content inventory as the foundation of your hierarchical sitemap. If it is logical, then you can build your sitemap from there.
• Type: The content’s format is important in helping understand the structure and mix of content on the site. Do you have videos, images, HTML formatted content or PDF files? They need to be in an easy-use format on the site.
• Metadata: Do your keywords appear on the title or descriptions? This is good for SEO because they appear in the search engines results.
• Links In/Out: Understand how your site is cross-linked with the content analysis tool crawl results.

Other information contained in the export will include the number of images, media and documents, Google analytics and a notes column.

Armed with the information provided in the DYNO Mapper interface, plus the Excel file export, you are now ready start a comprehensive audit with a content inventory. 

Additional Resources:

Download the Content inventory spreadsheet - http://maadmob.com.au/resources/content_inventory

What We Learned Analyzing 595 Buffer Blogposts: A Complete Content Audit and Spreadsheet Template, Kevan Lee

How to Perform a Content Audit, Kristina Kledzik

How to Conduct a Content Audit for Quality and Audience Experience, Sonia Simone

The most recommended way to understand a sitemap’s structure is to scrutinize an existing one. In this regard, we have gone ahead and prepared a sample map that can be used as a guide when creating one for your website. Simply copy the codes below and tweak where necessary to meet your specific objectives.

Note that creating a sitemap is now simple and stress-free, thanks to leading website mapping tools like http://dynomapper.com/. Anyone can now create a sitemap, you don’t have to be a programmer or spend hours on it because the tool will take care of all the details for you, try it out. 

http://www.domain.com/catalog?item=vacation_hawaii</loc>

There are various reasons why you might want to have multiple sitemap files in just one directory. If your website is very active, you sure will want to have a daily sitemap to take care of time-sensitive URLs and a weekly one for not-so-time-bound URLs. You can have as many sitemaps as you want so long as all the listed URLs are in a sub directory or a common location as the sitemap. What matters here is to ensure that the sitemaps shouldn’t have URLs from parent directories or entirely dissimilar directories. In the event that the above happens, the metadata won’t be trusted because it won’t be certain that the submitter has any control over the URL’s directory.

There are some known limitations associated with sitemaps. First, it shouldn’t be larger than 10 MB, and shouldn’t contain URLs exceeding 50,000. It is for this reason that you must use sitemap index if you intend to design a website with numerous sitemaps and directories.

With a sitemap index, you can include numerous sitemap files in just a single file known as sitemap index. The index uses similar index but the URLs have to be added to sitemaps as opposed to including the web pages’ URLs.

Find a sample sitemap index code below.

As clearly visible in the above sample, the following XML tags are used by the sitemap index;

• Loc
• Sitemap
• Lastmod
• Sitemapindex

The <lasmod> and <loc> tags are similar the ones in any normal sitemap file. Information regarding an independent sitemap is summarized by the <sitemap> tag while the <sitemapindex> tag offers information regarding every sitemap contained in the file. Always remember that sitemap files can only be files situated in the same subdomain or domain and has to be UTF-8 encoded too.

Your sitemap should be placed into your web server’s directory, this is highly recommended. This is because the set of URLs that can included in your sitemap’s file is determined by where it is located.

Example: A sitemap file that is located below a subdirectory can have links of all the pages in the very subcategory but not those above it. 

To effectively define the attributes and allowable elements that can appear in a sitemap file, search engines like Google utilizes XML schema. As shown in the example below, Google schema can easily be downloaded via the links provided below

• Sitemap schema from SiteMap.org for Sitemaps: 

• Sitemap Index schema from SiteMap.org for Sitemap index files: 

Based on this schema, you can use any of the many available tools to enable you validate your sitemap’s structure. For the complete list of available XML-related tools, visit, among others W3.org XML Schema Tools.

Please note that;

• The crawling process is not influenced in any way by the position in which you insert the URLs of your sitemap.
• It is not advisable to incorporate session IDs in your URLs because doing that may lead to erroneous or lack of crawling of the specific page
• In case your websites uses HTTP as well as HTTPS, do not add the two versions of your URLs, instead, select one you deem to be more fitting for the content.

Technology has simplified most of these processes because all you need today is an XML sitemap validator that will validate your xml sitemap and can even inform Google of their exact locations. In the event that problems are detected in your sitemaps, Dyno Mapper sitemap validator will communicate the same to you instantly so that you can make necessary changes before submitting it to the search engines. The location of your sitemap can also be pinged on search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com.

Dyno Mapper experts highly recommend that you use Google Webmaster Tools to inform the search engine of your new sitemap.