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.

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.

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.

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.

A content inventory can come in very handy when starting a website redesign, migrating to a new content management system, or just trying to figure out what to charge for a website redesign. Content inventories were traditionally managed within spreadsheets, but when created manually, they are very time consuming and tedious. When dealing with a very large website, the spreadsheet method can be hard to maintain and difficult to update. Not to mention, this makes collaboration extremely hard to pull off.

Create a content inventory using DYNO Mapper

DYNO mapper offers a new online software solution for content audits that can save you many hours of tedious work. DYNO Mapper enables content managers, content strategists, and user experience professionals to quickly create a comprehensive site inventory of your pages, images, links, and files associated within a website.

DYNO Mapper can answer your content inventory questions

• How many sub-domains are contained in your website?
• How many content levels and number in each level?
• How many pages?
• How many images, videos, and documents
• Where each of your content items are located?
• What is the URL of each content type?
• How many links and bad links are in your website?

Save time performing your website content audit

DYNO Mapper can save you countless hours of your precious time. If you are trying to audit a large website using a manual inventory method, this can be next to impossible. With DYNO Mapper, you can easily search, filter, and export Microsoft excel documents to steam-line your project or just work within the software until your project is complete. Signup today!

In this article, we will discuss and explain how to do a website content audit, why this is very useful, and how a content analysis tool can decrease your time and effort. But we will start first by answering the question “What is a content audit?”

What is a website content audit?

A content audit is a process that includes looking at all the content (data) in the website or a marketing funnel and determining the strong and weak points of it in order to maximize the marketing activities. This process is sometimes confused with a content inventory, which is just a list of all items on your website. When done in an effective way, a great content audit will help answer questions about which parts of the site an audience likes more and dislikes as well. It will give clear insight on potential issues that must be fixed in order to enhance the productivity of your website.

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.

Planning and creating a website’s structure is not an easy job for a large website. There are some specific steps that should be followed. This article will provide you with the main steps to make sure that the website architecture achieves your client’s expectations.

The very first step is tomake a planduring the discovery phase of the website development project. If you do not make a detailed plan then you will most likely end up with a scope creep, unpredicted increases to the project’s scope. They call it project creep because it often sneeks up on you and it is hard to get compensated for the extra work that did not go through the approval process. You will have no base on which to defend yourself against and could waste lots of your time and money. It will help you avoid possible disagreements about the final product; if you follow the plan that was accepted by the client, then it is much easier to finalize a project and get paid. 

A content inventory is one of the most important phases during content management system changes, upgrades or website redesigns. The inventory also doubles as a useful long-term content management tool. Without a clear understanding of why you are undertaking a content inventory, your expected results and who your target audience is, it is quite easy to find the exercise confusing.  Here are some of the considerations you need to make before embarking on the process.

A Content Inventory is simply a list that contains all of the content on a website. The inventory will typically include all text, images, applications, and documents. In order to gain knowledge from the inventory, it is necessary to assess each individual piece of content. Doing this will aid in understanding what exactly is on the site, if it is in the proper location, and if the content is up-to-date. Before the invention of content inventory tools, performing this process would be almost painstaking, and not completely free from errors. Whether someone was performing the content inventory by hand or entering it into a spreadsheet, there is always room for mistakes. With the invention of content inventory tools, like those provided by DYNO Mapper, anyone that has access to the internet can perform a content inventory. This will jumpstart the process of a website redesign, or will simply give the webmaster a look into the sitemap of the website. Once a website's content inventory is assessed, the webmaster can refer back to it when comparing progress on the new site map or redesign of the website.