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Home » Tools and Training » Content Management System (CMS) » Content Inventory Instructions
A content inventory is a tool to help you review and prioritize site content (text, photos, audio/video, documents, etc.) for migration into the content management system (CMS). It is also a way to gather information that will be used to set up site templates and workflows in the CMS environment. While many refer to this as a “mind numbing experience,” it is critical to the success of your migration project and doing the work up front can save a lot of development time later on.
The content inventory will help you:
- assess the state of the content on the site. Is your content up-to-date? Do you have information ROT (Redundant, Outdated or Trivial information)? Even the best-kept sites have it. Now is the time to identify the content that needs to be updated and make those changes before migrating it into the CMS.
- identify who is responsible for editing and approving the content on your site. You’ll need this information to set up the workflows in the CMS.
- establish a set of keywords or topics for each page. This information will become the keyword metadata in the CMS.
- determine how frequently the content should be updated (daily, weekly, monthly, each semester, annually, etc.) and use this information to set up automatic review notices in the CMS.
- identify content that can be reused within the site or on other sites.
- organize your site so that menus and breadcrumbs can be automated in the CMS.
Inventorying the content on your site will be a team process and should include both content creators and Web developers. Completing a content inventory differs from creating a site map or a map of the site’s directory structure. While you may refer to the directory structure periodically to make sure you haven’t missed hidden content, you’ll actually be working with the published Web site most of the time. As you click through the site, you’ll be reviewing the content on each page — something that can’t be done by a computer.
Start at the homepage and click through the site, one section at a time, recording the pages and/or content pieces as you go.
If you have a section with many similar pages (example: news releases or events), you may not need to inventory every page in that section. News releases, for example, may be published on your current site for archival purposes. The individual releases are unlikely to require updates, and it would be extremely time-consuming to inventory every release. In this case, you may want to make a “global” note in the inventory for that particular area by listing the number of releases, the type and a note that they are archived.
Content inventories will vary from site to site, so feel free to add columns to the spreadsheet to collect information you believe to be useful for your particular site. Remember this is a tool to help you get organized, so do what you need to make it useful to your situation.
Content inventory fields:
ID
The ID is attached to each piece of content in the site and should reflect the way a user moves through the site rather than the directory structure itself. Start with the homepage at 0.0. A main-level section page would be 1.0 and a sub-section would be 1.1 and so forth.
Title
The unique title or headline of the page or piece of content.
URL/filename
URL or directory path of content.
Content format
Choices may include:
- HTML paragraphs (may also want to specify a type specific to your site (e.g., news release, profile, etc.)
- HTML aggregate (an “index” page with links to other pages. Example: news releases, events, profiles).
- HTML form
- Image
- Image/text
- Intruder/sidebar text
- PDF
- Word document
- PowerPoint presentation
- Script (may need to specify type)
- Web Application
- External Link (a link to another site)
Keywords/topics (metadata)
Keywords or topics for a particular page. Think of these as the words someone might type into a search engine to find this particular page. Your team may want to create a controlled vocabulary to ensure consistency across the site. This helps you avoid situations where one person may enter the keyword “courses” while another uses “classes.”
Content status (ROT)
Up-to-date or needs review/revision? Also check for information ROT: Redundant (located elsewhere and doesn’t need to be reproduced here); Outdated (should this be updated or discontinued?); Trivial (unimportant, should be discontinued).
Editors
CMS users who should have access to edit this content.
Approvers
CMS users who should approve this content before it is published.
Content Review
How frequently should this content be reviewed? Daily; monthly; each semester; annually; every October; August and January of each year; etc.
Reuse
Is this content reused elsewhere on the site or on other sites? If so, where? If it isn’t currently being reused, could it be and where?
Notes
Any other notes you’d like to make about the content. Noting broken links, HTML display problems, graphic problems, etc.
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