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Best methods for website content inventory?

Liam

We are embarking on a major web redesign project and I wanted to poll the group to see if anyone had any suggestions for a method of creating an inventory our current massive, hulking, organically-grown website.

At present, the site contains some 75,000+ documents or so, and has not gone through any sort of redesign or focused information architecture efforts in almost 10 years. We do not have any CMS on our site, and the site is not well divided up into sections that closely reflect the departments of our organization. I have begun this project by creating a cross-departmental task force, but now that the time is upon us to begin creating this inventory I am a bit stumped.

I realize I could simply create an excel spreadsheet and attempt to manage the process through that, while assigning out chunks of the website to the different members of the task force, but there is also an issue of overlap of content - meaning there will be parts of the website that more than just one person or department has a stake in. Further, I'd like to try to organize this into a way that the members of the task force will feel a more involved, vested interest in the process - so that they will actually go and DO what is ultimately assigned to them =)

Has anyone been in a similar position? How did you approach this daunting task? Any advice or warnings are appreciated!

Replies to this Topic

Maggie

Geez--that doesn't sound fun! How about burn it to the ground and start over? ;)

Do you have in your budget to work with an outside consultant on this at all? Or is it up to staff alone to pull this off? If at all possible, I would suggest at least working with a consultant for the inventory--I don't see how it would be possible to grasp that amount of content and do anything useful with it without some outside help.

I'll ask around my dept (I work on the web team) to see how they went about starting our redesign process (I came once it had already started and they were pretty far into the process). By the time I started we were already doing card-sorting, working out navigation, etc--the content had obviously been inventoried in some fashion.

 

 

Liam

Hi Maggie,

Thanks for responding.

Fortunately, we do have a consultant that we will be bringing in to work with us on the project.

Unfortunately, we're pretty much already accepting that we're going to go over budget on the whole thing so everything I can possibly do in-house before we get to the consultant phase is for the best. Which leaves me in the position of doing our best to tackle this content issue as early as possible, for it will undoubtedly eat up a significant amount of consulting hours otherwise.

I'd love to hear back from you if you get any good suggestions. Thanks again.

 

Elizabeth

Liam,

When I worked at Beaconfire, the process you just described was exactly what we did - either we, or preferably the client both to save money and because they knew their content better, would go through the entire site listing each page in a treed form (so we knew how things related to each other) with a notation to keep/keep but edit/dump.

We kept track in a spreadsheet, and we parceled out the site for review into each department, with the core team/web task force charged with reviewing and approving the results before migration.

Elizabeth

Maggie

Liam--I just read this in Bean Creative's blog and thought of you...Best Practices in Website Content

decosta

Recently i have joined a softwere company but i don't have more knowledge regarding the website content inventory and these tips are more useful for me , so plz let me know more tips regarding this topic.

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