When you take the time to understand the content that already exists, not only will you be able to ensure that it’s supported in the new design, but you’ll actually make the entire design stronger because you’ll have realistic scenarios to design with and for — not to mention an opportunity to clean out the bad outdated muck before it obscures your sparkly new design.
If content parity matters to you (and it damn well should if you care one whit about the “large and growing minority of Internet users” who always or mostly access the Web on a mobile device), then at some point you’ll have to deal with the unruly content lurking underneath your website’s neat surface. Because chances are there’ll be stuff out there that you’ve never thought about, much less designed for. And all that stuff has to go somewhere — too often, left in an mobile unfriendly design.But if you’re trying to work with a website with thousands of URLs — or anything more than a few dozen, really — you have to ask: Which content do I design with?
Once you’ve taken stock of what you have, gotten rid of the garbage and identified the patterns, you’ll also need to decide which attributes each content type needs to include: Do articles have date stamps? Does this need a byline? What about images? Features? Benefits? Timelines? Ingredients? Pull quotes? This will enable you to turn all of those old shapeless pages — “blobs,” as Karen McGrane has so affectionately labeled them — into a system of content that’s defined and interlinked. Regardless of what you want to do with your content — launch a responsive website, publish to multiple websites simultaneously, extract snippets of content for the home page, reuse the content in an app, mash it up with a third party’s content — this sort of structure will make it possible, because it enables you to pick and choose which bits should go where, when.
TOOLS FOR AUDITING CONTENT LINK
The content audit may not be new, but some tools to help you get started are. Lately, I’ve been running initial reports with the Content Analysis Tool (CAT).
Using CAT’s Web interface, you can sift through the report and see details such as page types, titles, descriptions and images.
While features such as screenshots of all pages and lists of links are useful for individual analysis, I prefer to export CAT’s reports into a big ol’ CSV file, where the raw data looks like this, with each row of the spreadsheet representing a single URL
The Secret To Scale Link
You don’t have to love auditing content. You certainly don’t need to develop a sick addiction to pivot tables (but it’s totally OK if you do). What you will love, I promise, is what a deep knowledge of content enables you to do: create an extensible design system that doesn’t devolve at scale.
BuzzTo is a reputed web designing company in Toronto who can avail these Content driven services and effective web designing tools in your business website in a cost effective way.
If content parity matters to you (and it damn well should if you care one whit about the “large and growing minority of Internet users” who always or mostly access the Web on a mobile device), then at some point you’ll have to deal with the unruly content lurking underneath your website’s neat surface. Because chances are there’ll be stuff out there that you’ve never thought about, much less designed for. And all that stuff has to go somewhere — too often, left in an mobile unfriendly design.But if you’re trying to work with a website with thousands of URLs — or anything more than a few dozen, really — you have to ask: Which content do I design with?
Once you’ve taken stock of what you have, gotten rid of the garbage and identified the patterns, you’ll also need to decide which attributes each content type needs to include: Do articles have date stamps? Does this need a byline? What about images? Features? Benefits? Timelines? Ingredients? Pull quotes? This will enable you to turn all of those old shapeless pages — “blobs,” as Karen McGrane has so affectionately labeled them — into a system of content that’s defined and interlinked. Regardless of what you want to do with your content — launch a responsive website, publish to multiple websites simultaneously, extract snippets of content for the home page, reuse the content in an app, mash it up with a third party’s content — this sort of structure will make it possible, because it enables you to pick and choose which bits should go where, when.
TOOLS FOR AUDITING CONTENT LINK
The content audit may not be new, but some tools to help you get started are. Lately, I’ve been running initial reports with the Content Analysis Tool (CAT).
Using CAT’s Web interface, you can sift through the report and see details such as page types, titles, descriptions and images.
While features such as screenshots of all pages and lists of links are useful for individual analysis, I prefer to export CAT’s reports into a big ol’ CSV file, where the raw data looks like this, with each row of the spreadsheet representing a single URL
The Secret To Scale Link
You don’t have to love auditing content. You certainly don’t need to develop a sick addiction to pivot tables (but it’s totally OK if you do). What you will love, I promise, is what a deep knowledge of content enables you to do: create an extensible design system that doesn’t devolve at scale.
BuzzTo is a reputed web designing company in Toronto who can avail these Content driven services and effective web designing tools in your business website in a cost effective way.
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