The What of a Web Site: Content Analysis

After clarifying the business goals for a Web site and the needs of the target audience, determine the content that can meet those goals.

Auditing Content

It’s helpful to start with a content survey to get the big picture of the scope and nature of the material, types of content, topics covered, different formats, and whether much is outdated. The survey will also help you decide the best way to set up the spreadsheet for recording your data when you do a detailed audit.

To get started, find, print and analyze a representative sample of the site content. Be sure to get a mix of formats (such as text files, applications, video, audio, archived email messages, Web forms) and the variety of content types (such as news releases, how-to articles, white papers, etc.).

Recording Results

Set up your spreadsheet so each row holds the record of a page on the site, and each column contains needed information such as:

• URL
• Page Name
• Format
• Topic (subject matter)
• Content Type (to help identify the kinds of templates needed for different kinds of content)
• Content Owner
• Expiration/Update Date
• Unique identifier (a number of lettering convention that you assign).

Decide what information you need and how you’ll collect it (such as whether Page Name will be collected from the HTML Page Title tag or the actual headline on the page). Your goal is to collect the data in the same way for each page.

If you are auditing content to determine whether to keep, kill or modify it, you’ll want a column for that (named something like Action). If you are also doing a gap analysis to identify content that needs to be created, you can include that info in the Action column. Here are a few rows to illustrate:

Re-Organizing Content

Once the data gathering is finished, you’re ready to analyze it and synthesize it into a simple model of the content. There’s no quick way to do this; you generally have to wallow in the content for a while before patterns start to emerge. This is a good exercise to do with a small group of clients or co-workers. Working together, identify the site’s major content components, put each one on a sticky note, and group them according to user and business goals. The clearer your understanding of your users and site goals, the more straightforward the process. You can diagram the results using a program like Visio.

When you’re done, your new visualization of the content may bear no relation to the current site structure. Try card sorts or other user tests to see if you’ve hit the mark.

For an excellent description of the process, see: Taking a Content Inventory

For other keys to successful Web sites, please see:

• The Why of a Web Site: Business Goals
• The Who of a Web Site: Target Audience