How long should a content audit take?

[Leif Kendall]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to work out how long a content audit should take - does anyone have thoughts on the typical time required per web page?

Obviously it depends a lot on the number of factors you're considering, and the complexity of the pages, but in terms of quoting for a content audit, I'm wondering if the time per page should be 10 minutes or 30 minutes - or something else entirely...

Any thoughts gratefully received!

Leif


--
Leif Kendall
Kendall Copywriting: copywriting agency | freelance copywriting
http://kendallcopywriting.co.uk
M: 07790 748 243

[Donna Spencer]

Depends on whether you are doing a quicker skim of 'what types of stuff do we have' or a deeper 'what's the purpose of this content, is it accurate, is it up to date, what's it made of'. For the former, a couple of minutes, for the latter, still probably no more than 10 minutes - you're not going to read every word.

Also depends on the size of the site. If it's a hundred page site you may actually read most of it. I'm working on a gazillion page university website at the moment and there's no way I'm going to read even part of it :)

Donna

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Content Strategy" group.
To post to this group, send email to content...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to contentstrate...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/contentstrategy?hl=en.

[Michelle Wallace]

Hi Leif,

 

A content audit doesn't only depend on how much time it takes to get a sense of what is on the pages, but also on what the documentation itself will be used for. What I mean is that the way you document your findings from the audit (the degree of detail) greatly influences the total time needed.

 

What fields are you going to include in your spreadsheet? Will you need to summarize the content from each page in one of the fields and judge its quality on the spreadsheet or are you simply accounting for the pages that exist, their URLs, and the overall structure of the site? I would figure out what the end goal for the audit is first then you can determine how long you need to quote per page...

 

In Halverson's book Content Strategy, there is a chapter about auditing that is great for this -- very handy, hands-on info in there and not too much to read so if you don't have this book, I highly recommend it. She discusses what are possible fields you could include in your spreadsheet and how it varies depending upon the way you want to use the audit when completed.

 

Hope this helps!

 

Michelle

[Rachel McAlpine]

HI everyone

I'm going to throw a wild number into the mix, to show that what Donna says ("it depends") is absolutely right.

A few years back I contracted to do a content survey of an intranet in 2 weeks. I thought it was a crazy short time, yet there was a lot of merit in just setting a time limit and then stopping. It's hard the first few times to estimate job time. When the client gives you a time limit, you figure what you want to achieve in that time. I think usually it's better to do a light survey of the whole than a thorough survey of a fraction of the site.

The report was simply 17 pages of spreadsheet, plus a brief summary.

Setting up the spreadsheet was crucial. Turned out the intranet had about 30,000 pages of which  around 20,000 were obvious ROT. The survey was more than adequate for the client's purpose. It was obvious the intranet needed more than just a tidy-up.

I certainly didn't view every page where I found lumps of similar content. Instead I had a column labelled "links to". For example, one page linked to 18,000 pages of 'old what's new': I skimmed a handful to make sure they were all a similar type of content before moving on. 

For this particular survey my columns were as follows, because this was the information needed by the client. 

1. page numbers in my own system (e.g. 2.1.3, or if the row summarises a section with 65 similar pages, 2.1.3.1-65) 

2. page name

3. content type

4. date

5. ROT — the most important column! 

6. notes

7. URL

8. Links to

9. owner

Hope that helps. 

Rachel

-----------------------

Rachel McAlpine

Contented.com

PO Box 19244

Wellington 6149

+64 4 384-7106

--

[Leif Kendall]

Hi everyone,

Thanks very much for your thoughts.

I've actually been reading Kristina Halvorson's book - so happy to have found it! I've been doing some content strategy work without realising it, but doing it by experimenting and by creating processes that seem logical. It's a massive relief to find a book that covers this stuff and provides a framework for looking at the bigger issues around web content!!!

Anyway, that's enough exclamation marks from me... (!)

Thanks again,

Leif