Content Strategy Development: Content Audit
Or, as we’ve dubbed it internally, “eating our own dogfood“.
The existing Web Publishing Guide and the associated Better Practice Checklists have plenty of guidance regarding Maintenance, Managing Online Content and Implementing a Content Management System.
Even though we’re not implementing a new CMS (at least not initially), the following activities described in our own guidance have proved to be enormously useful at this stage in the project:
Content Audit
This was a fairly straightforward exercise for a 90-page site and, with some quick visits to our search and web-stats, we were able to produce a table similar to the following (with a sample entry below):
| Page Name | Page URL | 2009 Visits | % Total Traffic | Review Period (Months) | Mandate(s) | Contributor(s) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Visual Design and Branding | /Branding | 1541 | 1.34% | 6 | N/A | Attorney General’s – Culture Branch |
Some of these columns may require some further explanation:
- Review periods hadn’t previously been formalised on a per-page basis. After the launch in 2007, reviews had been conducted on a per-page, ad-hoc basis. A page like Branding may require a longer review period than our guidance on Online Consultation Guidelines (presently a fast-moving field); and a shorter review period than a page like e-Government Strategy 2006 (which is unlikely to change often). The maximum review period we settled on was 12 months.
- Many of the advice pages are produced in response to particular mandates - we have a legal obligation to make the information available. Even if a page did not register a single visit over the course of a year (all pages had at least one visit, incidentally), we would’ve been required to keep pages with related mandates as part of the site.
- AGIMO often consults with specialists in other government agencies to produce guidance. Where external contributors were involved, we have recorded the number and nature of contributors, as it will assist in determining the additional level of effort required to conduct a review of co-authored content.
Producing a similar report for off-site content that we’ve determined may be suitable for consolidation has helped open up negotiations with authors of the external content, and allowed us to compare ‘apples against apples’.
The good news? We were quickly able to determine:
- Which of the most-visited pages were most in need of review
- The effort involved in reviewing existing co-authored pages (and prioritise them accordingly)
- Appropriate metadata schemes to store (and expose) these values to the public, and to assist in creating automated internal reports. Thank you very much, AGLSTERMS.Mandate, DCTERMS.Contributor and DCTERMS.Valid.
What we’re left with is a long list of content to review and, where necessary, consolidate, expand upon, create from scratch or remove.
RSS News Feed
That’s a great approach for a relatively small site (several hundred pages at most).
With larger sites it becomes necessary to ‘chunk’ together related pages and look at them in groups, but following the same basic process.
When opportunity permits, it’s quite useful allowing the audience to report out of date or inaccurate content. Having a ‘rate this page’ feature along with a “How can we improve?” question is quite useful too. Sometimes we have up to date content but what we are saying may be irrelevant or unnecessary.