Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site) is damn good. As was Janice's previous article on content inventories in web techniques. Painful, necessary, useful: that's the content inventory.

There's a problem with their content inventory example: it never breaks the content out from the preexisting pages. I think it's more useful to inventory the content elements within a page than it is to inventory exisiting pages, since the existing pages can themselves be poorly organized.

It's helpful to note the page location of each existing content element, but the elements must be separated from the pages in order to re-sort the content effectively.

Well, that would be easy enough to do, by adding rows for each content element.

In our experience, though, having performed lengthy content inventories on a number of sites, is that on pretty much every site we looked at, each page was a distinct piece of content. That once you stripped away navigation elements, there was not more than one chunk of content on any one page. And I'm guessing this is true for most folks out there.

Gosh Peter, you must work with a great set of writers. I started a content inventory today while writing a proposal. I only have to deal with about 30 pages, but many of them are 2000 words. Definitely more than one chunk in there!

I think this will be a chunking (content) and chucking (words) project...

So, Peter, it sounds like the sites you worked on had a very granular content organization, with only one content element per page, yes?

I have to say that I've had the opposite experience, and I've been working with large content sites for about 5 years now. Interesting how there's such a variety of clients out there.

Were you working on catalog/retail sites, by any chance? I can see how that kind of site would have a great many pages where there would be one kind of content per page.

Sam's write up suggests a chunk-approach. Worth looking at, along with Janice's.

One thing I notice about Janice's write up is she points out that the columns vary based on project need. I think this is important to keep in mind. One project CIQ did had multiple content on each page, another project I've lent a hand on has the one-content, one-page approach.

I think another important question is "what do you want to glean form your inventory/audit" It can be valuable to try to harvest terms while you are inventorying, rather than go back later.

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