Website Accessibility Testing

Who within your organization or your client’s organization should be tasked with auditing your website content? Anyone with basics on content creation, organization and display can carry out a website content audit and the findings should be shared with all personnel and departments in the organization.

The main aim of a content audit is not only to simply collect data but also have the information you need to make informed decisions.  An individual can conduct a content audit and the process improved through the formation of a multi-disciplinary team.  All the experts involved in content audit gain greater insight into the site’s content by breaking down the audit process in respect to areas of expertise and using the services of a team who understand the technology, systems and standards involved in the content lifecycle of your website.

Content Strategists And Marketers

Members of the content team that is comprised of content marketers, content strategists and content writers are the owners of the content audit process and yields of undertaking content inventories and audits.  These processes are conducted, as they constitute very important strategy creation pieces. Audits provide the base for the current state of the content, help in identifying areas of low quality or poorly performing content, and allow for the creation of a gap analysis as well as the roadmap of how to get from where the site is to where you want it to be.

Information Architects and User Experience Designers

The insights got from undertaking an inventory and audit are also important and useful to information architects and user experience designers. Developing the designs of navigation systems, user flows, and taxonomies without the benefit of a thorough understanding of the existing content can give rise to designs that do not sufficiently support user needs or behave desirably in multi-channel and multi-device environments.

At some point, you may find yourself having to deal with undesired content lurking in the background of your website’s neat surface. This is because chances are that there will be content in your website that you have never thought about and consequently not developed any designs for. Such content has to go somewhere and in most cases, it becomes shoehorned into a website layout that it was not meant to occupy or even migrate to an outdated website with an unfriendly design.

Content Managers and Developers

For the site managers and technical teams that are planning to have a content migration, it is important to understand the type of content that exists, the amount of content present, and the changes that it might undergo when moving from one system to another. A content audit done before a website migration should be inclusive of a keep/kill pass, for purposes of ensuring that only the content fit for migration is migrated.  It should also take into consideration the content issues that can be fixed as part of or in advance of the actual migration such as coding issues that have an effect on rendering or non-consistent structure that will be difficult to migrate cleanly. Audit findings affect the design and production of features within the CMS, such as the content tree structure, the content input and rendering structures, and the taxonomy & tagging features.

Sharing your audit findings with the technical team as well as pairing with your UX counterparts for purposes of ensuring that the new CMS or site structure is configured properly for your content will save you unnecessary troubles and challenges during migration of content.

Business Stakeholders

Most likely, if you are undertaking a site audit, you are doing it for purposes of a larger business goal: a planned site migration, there are new business ventures related to the site, or there is a general need to give the site a good makeover.  Your audit should play a vital role in informing your stakeholders on which side of the house they are on, whether on the business side or on the technical side.

Customers

Though it may seem uncommon for customers to be site auditors, it is worth noting that they already are. Everytime a customer browses your website whether when buying a product or just browsing product, they are developing an opinion about the site. You should watch your website analytics to see the length of time they spend on your website, whether they come back later, or where and when they leave your site. These are valuable hints to the performance of your content.

Your site’s search log will provide you with first hand information on whether they are using the same language used in your website and if they are able to find what they are looking for. If you fail to pay attention to this data, then you may be missing priceless opportunities for your website.  If your visitors leaves comments on your content, share the comments and address the concerns they raise about the user experience of your site. Your customers and site visitors are the most valuable and honest site auditors as they audit your site as it is, with no bias whatsoever.

Additional Resources:

How To Do a Content Audit - Step-by-Step, Everett Sizemore

How To Conduct A Content Audit, Rebecca Lieb

The best way to efficient website content maintenance is first having a proper understanding of your current content and how it serves the business purpose.  You may be familiar with different ways of administering a website but the inventory presents a key way to understand content.

A quantitative content inventory is a document that highlights all your web pages as well as data about those pages. Even though the document has previously been seen as time consuming and mind numbing, it has been of great use to website designers, information architects, site managers and content strategists. Auditing content manually is time-consuming and can be costly, that is why it is recommended that you speed up the process with a website content audit tool. The tool is able to provide an accurate highlight of your website data and thereby makes it possible for you to focus delivering a quality service to your customers.  

Questions Answered by Qualitative Content Inventories

• How many pages are in the website?
• How many and what are the other types of contents (images, videos, documents) and what pages are they associated with?
• What is the location of the pages, identified by URL?
• How is the URL structured?
• How many inbound and outbound links are there?

What is the Importance of Conducting Content Inventories?

For many years, web professionals have been manually conducting content inventories, by clicking through web pages and recording content resources in separate worksheets or by using tools designed for other purposes (like web crawlers) for easy copy and paste work. The advantage of using software to automate some of the work is that the software provides a comprehensive list of URLs without much effort. In addition to this, the software can run in the background while you are working on your website audit.

Role of a Content Inventory in the Management and Maintenance of a Website

Content inventories have numerous uses. First, they ensure that you have the information you need to understand your content catalog and make sound decisions based on the evidence. A well-defined assessment of the pages you have enables you to come up with a strategy for your content lifecycle from continuous maintenance to future development, re-use and migration of the content in your website. Content inventories are very important in projects like fresh designs, redesigns, or migration. Using software tools, you can effortlessly build content inventories to ease the process of gathering content with just one tool, communicate to stakeholders about website size and speed up the content audit processes.

Why Should You Use a Tool when Tracking Website Content?

There are common issues that you might face when conducting a content inventory. First, not all content management systems have automated inventories. Also, creating a manual inventory is close to impossible for a website with 200,000 or more URLS. Furthermore, we use different tools to gather and store data; all of them require manual manipulation to represent the actual page structure of the website.

All of these factors affect the ability of the management and staff to make informed decisions concerning website content. Having a clearly structured inventory can double as an important factor in communicating between many parties. Since most content inventories are collected in spreadsheets, a software that enables you to instantly display information to multiple parties and easily export into Excel as well as other spreadsheet software will give you great flexibility in customizing reports for different audiences.

Advantages of Content Inventories

Website content inventory software goes a long way in saving time when working towards discovering the breadth of your content. Working with websites routinely makes it easy to know the amount of content contained and how it is structured.  A content inventory can appear to be a redundant activity but it helps in communicating the breadth of websites to stakeholders.  If the main decision makers do not know and wish to know what there is, all you need is a quantitative inventory. Content inventory software like DYNO Mapper makes it easy and possible to work from a more accurate understanding of website content.

Content Inventories are the Foundations to Content Audits

Armed with a content inventory, it becomes possible for you to build content audits, documents that enable you to review page-by-page how content measures against the set quality and effectiveness measures.  The DYNO Mapper tool measures up as a web content inventory that forms the basis of an informed content audit by returning the most crucial information about your website: how much of the information there is, the types of content you have (pages, audio, video, and documents) and the URL structure, which can provide valuable hints to content types (eg.  Product pages on an e-commerce site will have similar URL patterns), and the structuring of the website (from URL structure perspective).

Use the tool to quickly identify important information about each page in your website such as:

• Location (URL)
• Text:html, xml
• File Type
• Application: pdf, doc,xls
• Web files:js,css
• Images: jpeg, tif, png
• Media: swf, mp3, mp4
• Path
• Size
• Level

With a basic comprehension of your content’s breadth, you can set up measures for the evaluation and analysis of content. Build up your skills on using software tools for better time efficiency when carrying out a content audit or tracking content overtime. 

Additional Resources:

The Rolling Content Inventory, Lou Rosenfeld

How to Create a Content Strategy, Ian Lurie

Website design and redesign is a costly process. Content creation and management is equally time-consuming and expensive but very vital to the life of any online business. To better understand your content and how it connects with the customers and users, you need to qualitatively and quantitatively analyze your content. To do this, you need to use a content inventory which is a comprehensive list of files organized in a spreadsheet or software that you can use to plan the content of a new site or improve on an existing one.

During website redesign and migration, the content inventory accumulates more information to the initial list of files. The content manager can include more columns of data such as assigning ownership of each content on the website, review status, important notes for migration, URLs, metadata plus many more as needed. The organization of the spreadsheet is based on the site’s structure for easy deriving of the navigational model. You can also use the inventory for tracking content on different systems. Furthermore, it can even double up as the copy deck for guiding how each page is rebuild. By the end of the project this document is normally filled with lots of comprehensive information on the website’s content structure.

Why Create a Content Inventory?

There are many reasons why creating a content inventory is very important. Here are some of the reasons;

• Use it as a foundation for tracking website migration
• Offers basis for project estimation
• Measures the website’s landscape as it is
• Helps in the identifications of content structure
• Offer a baseline of comparision

When Should You Inventory?

There is no specific time when you should create an inventory. However, the following are the three most common and important times to inventory;

• During regular ongoing website maintenance
• At the beginning of a website redesign
• When preparing for a CMS migration
• After a CMS migration

Most people don’t like working with content inventories for various reasons. First, creating a comprehensive inventory is time-consuming. Second, they can quickly become outdated if you frequently update the site. Finally, content inventories are not easy to maintain and when they are customized, they are not easy to update.

The solution to the problem above lies in the use of automatic content analysis tool like DYNO Mapper. This application makes it possible for content managers and strategists to quickly and reliably create wide-ranging inventories offering rich data about every page, including inbound and outbound links, quantity and nature of images, videos, downloads and documents on each page. You also get to review metadata such as page descriptions and titles. You can keep the inventory updated by being able to locate new, deleted or altered files, which is important for maintaining superior quality content on the site.

Additional Resources:

The Rolling Content Inventory, Lou Rosenfeld

How to Create a Content Strategy, Ian Lurie

The Long Happy Life of a Content Inventory, Paula Land

Taking a Content Inventory, Donna Maurer

Taking a Content Inventory, Janice Crotty Fraser

Content Inventories, Audits, and Analyses: All part of benchmarking, Rahel Anne Bailie

The Content Inventory is Your Friend, Kristina Halvorson

Building the Mother of All Content Inventories, Sue Davis

The content inventory, Rahel Anne Bailie

Use a Content Audit Tool to Boost and Speed Up Information Gathering

By turning your content inventory into a content audit, you get access to an authoritative tool that can help you understand your website better. With both qualitative and quantitative information, auditing your content lets you scrutinize and analyze deeper pages and gain a clear understanding about the organization, display and maintenance of your content. Using a dependable website content audit software such as DYNO Mapper, you can build the website content inventory, and start the analysis of various areas as you prepare for a comprehensive audit process.

Everyone in the organization that deals or manages content can conduct a content audit. The following are however the most frequent content auditors;

• Content managers and developers
• Marketers and content strategists
• Website designers and managers
• SEO managers
• Taxonomists and information architects

It is important to involve a multi-disciplinary team during a content audits because content audits can stretch beyond data collection. Rather, it is more about having the information sufficient enough to guide the decision making for the organization. You should therefore break down areas of expertise and engage a team that understands systems, technology and standards that are involved in a typical content lifecycle. Whoever is involved in the process gains much better understanding of the content and works towards improving the user experience.

How Important is Content Auditing

Content audits enable you to comprehend and evaluate how a website performs against set business goals, various user needs, editorial standards and various performance indicators like SEO, web analytics and content use. They therefore add value to the site and maintenance assignments by letting you to document and scrutinize content organization, patterns and consistency. You stand a high chance of getting the highest possible volume of targeted areas of content improvement if the content audits are customized to the company’s content goals.

They are very useful for helping you recognize whether the site’s content follows a specific template consistently, metadata guidelines, editorial styles, among others. They also lay the foundation for proper gap analysis between the content that you currently have on site and that you would like to have. Finally, it sets the pace for content revision, deletion and migration.

Content inventories and audits are important in a site’s lifecycle. They may appear as usual documents, but they are useful in connecting designers, stakeholders, technologists and content managers. It is therefore essential to cautiously document all aspects that you can derive from the DYNO Mapper content audit tool like types of content, quantities, content structure, and many more. The audit should serve as a tool to further look into the relevancy of the content, how they perform against the business and user goals and areas that require improvements. Gain more insight into web users’ interaction with your site’s pages by combining content audits with website analytics.

Content Auditing Duration

There is no specific time duration for conducting a content audit; it all depends on the size of the website, basically the number of pages. However, comprehensive and meaningful content audits are mostly time-consuming because the analysis section consumes most of the time as opposed to information gathering. However, you can cut the amount of time you use by strategically planning ahead. Also, make use of content audit tools like DYNO Mapper for data collection automation and set goals for evaluation of content long before the audit. In addition, determine the nature of quantitative and qualitative data you would like to gather from the audit beforehand.

Using Tools to Build Content Audits

You can use software to collect crucial data regarding web pages resulting in comprehensive analysis using automated content audit software. You can gather a myriad of information from a content audit using DYNO Mapper such as page urls, page titles, metadata, inbound and outbound links, and complete list of images, videos and audio files among others.

Website Migration and Content Audits

Moving a site to a different platform or simple website redesigns or any serious changes on the website is a great chance to take stock and get rid of waste. Irrespective of the reason you are migrating to a different platform, it is important that you understand what you currently have, what you would like to retain, delete or modify. Migration will not be a hassle if the content audit is up to date and you can also use it to keep tabs on your content over a period of time.

Finally, it must be stressed that frequent audits will go a long way in ensuring that you deliver the customer promise whenever they check out your site. Consistency is very important because you definitely don’t want to confuse your visitors. If you get this right, your business growth will be more definite than blinding keeping content on the website without proper understanding. 

Additional Resources:

How To Conduct A Content Audit, Rebecca Lieb

How to Conduct a Content Audit on Your Site, Neil Patel