As announced earlier this month, I’m currently attending the Web Communications and Strategies Conference at Salisbury University.
This morning, I had the opportunity to ride with Elaine Montambeau from the College of Charleston and Thom Haller, the consultant behind Info Design. Thom also teaches information architecture at several universities and works for several governmental agencies and associations in Washington, DC.
Because it’s still a rare occurrence to meet information architects in higher ed, I jumped on the occasion and asked a few tips about content audits.
What about content audits? Some of you might be thinking. Well, these are the content inventories usually performed on existing website before a major website redesign and/or revamp of its content architecture.
It’s a daunting task, as you need to review and assess each page of a website while logging its location within the site map (the category it belongs to), url and any other relevant information. As any inventory, it’s long and painful, but provides invaluable information.
In our short commute from the hotel to Salisbury University, Thom explained that the best way to go for any content audit is to hire some help (interns or student workers).
Then, he came up with an interesting metaphor to explain where to start once it’s time to use the huge amount of data produced by such content inventories:
“I like to think of this data about existing content as “words”, while the data you get from your research about the users will give you “verbs.” Once you get both types of information, you just need to sort and match nouns with verbs. You might have to create more words, and probably to delete some.”