Monday, November 27, 2006

Content inventory is complete

I started a content inventory late last week and I'm finally done—what an absolutely mind numbing experience. Our national website tally: 1,163 pages. Every page was touched at least once…possibly even twice.

My URL hand-crawl experience (and I feel it too) revealed the following:

  • Over 800 html pages;
  • Nearly 250 PDFs;
  • 50-60 broken links;
  • 25-40 word document downloads;
  • Roughly a couple dozen photo album; and
  • Less than a handful of video downloads.
This project took over 20 hours to complete. I just hope—aside from me getting a wee bit more intimate with our online content—that this is useful outside of the circle.

However, regarding our content and existing information architecture, I am more confused than I ever been. I would guess that over 90% of our pages have some sort of a past due date on them…which will require greater personal care and maintenance as we move forward with the discovery period.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I can only imagine what a pain in the ass this was. A couple of years ago, I had an intern do this just with our dam removal pages and think she might have wanted to quit because of it.

Chas Offutt said...

I know the feeling, 150 pages are dam related (pun intended).

But it's an obvious (dam removal) hook for our site and I think a really easy good way to tell our story.

I mean, who doesn't want to see an obsolete dam blown up?