The User Experience Blog for Website Architecture Planning

Productivity tools are an essential part of completing a successful website redesign. Some individuals might think that the task of redesigning their website means simply giving it a facelift—this is not the case. Doing this will cause an array of problems. It is essential for the webmaster to know the content that makes up the website and how it performs, as well as how to proceed with new content going forward. Visual sitemaps, content inventories, content audits, Google Analytics, and content planning tools are made to assist with discovering the meat of a website, and translating what you should do with it.

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.

For anyone who has an established website with good traffic and search rankings, the greatest challenge of a website redesign is reaching or surpassing the current algorithms so rankings and traffic is not lost. That is generally not an easy task, and for good reasons. Let's look at the top 10 website redesign mistakes site owners usually make.

The Opportunity for Search Engine Optimization

Colleges and universities can improve their search engine rankings by focusing on a proper website structure, good content development, and a strategic use of keywords.

Search engine optimization is the process used to manage website content in a way that will elevate the ranking in search engines. The most predominant place that people research information and make their informed decisions are search engines. In relation to higher education, potential students may be researching schools, the academic community will be researching topics, and Web users will be looking for academic information on Google as well as any other search engines. The impact that searching on the web has on higher education is quite important. Education accounts for a very high percentage of web traffic that is generated by search engine referrals. Because of this, it is vital for colleges and universities to achieve higher rankings for popular search terms.

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.