Content audits help determine what needs to stay and go when reorganising a site. Content auditing is a tedious and un-sexy job but you can’t undertake a redesign of a content-heavy site without it.
The main purpose of a content audit is to produce a listing of the site’s content. From this list, you can determine the importance and priority of content, identify duplicates, relationships, and generally think about there overall structure before plugging ahead with a full site redesign.
I typically record a content audit in a spreadsheet so they’re easy to share with other people on the team.
EXAMPLE:
The example provided is a snapshot of a fairly a short content audit performed on a content heavy site, prior to a redesign. Here content was captured along with it’s author and additional notes so that a job of rationalisation could begin. It also helped when migrating over to a new content management system.
As mentioned earlier in my portfolio, a content audit often feeds into a solid content strategy, from which authors can use to rationalise existing content, restructure, repurpose or start again!