The 2002 Adaptive Path blog post Doing a Content Inventory (Or, A Mind-Numbingly Detailed Odyssey Through Your Web Site) certainly has staying power, and it was excellent when it came out. But times have changed, and I'm amazed how often the blog post is still referenced. In particular, one of the things you are after in your content inventory is to see the variety and patterns of your content, and that isn't necessarily about plodding through every page of your site manually. Here are some key reasons why you should think more innovatively about your inventory:
There are many potential sources of data for an inventory
The first question you should ask yourself is "why am I doing this inventory?" It may be for general exploration of your content, but chances are you have a specific need. Your specific need may require data that you can't get by clicking around your site from the home page. For example, if you are looking to delete content then chances are it would be useful to know how many pageviews the content is getting. Sources of data for an inventory include: the HTML as viewed by the visitor, how content is used by visitors (such as pageviews), the origin system of the content (such as the CMS), and the intent of the site / quality evaluation.
Sometimes a line-by-line inventory isn't necessary
One of the key things you're probably looking for is patterns in your content. It isn't necessarily what to do with specific content items. For example, you may be interested in whether you have recent content on specific topics to determine if your topics list is accurate — in this case, the specific content on each topic isn't important but the fact that you have some underrepresented topics may be the entire point. Or if you are attempting to do an initial migration estimate (for example via the six steps of handling content during a migration) then you don't need every piece of content enumerated (although of course there are risks in sampling).
ROT (redundant, outdated, and trivial) isn't a yes / no question
Not only are there more factors in deciding what content can be dropped (or needs to be updated) on your site, making a ROT determination is ideally based on rules and not individual inspection of every piece of content. This is especially important for very large sites, but perhaps even more important is that you want to set up processes for ongoing hygiene of your content.
You can get a lot of value out of automation
Even if you do decide that you need to have full inventory with each piece of content enumerated as a separate line in your inventory, this doesn't mean that someone has to click through every page to do the inventory. In fact, you can get a lot of value from automating the collection of the inventory. This doesn't necessarily just mean pointing some crawler / spider at you site either, for example it could query directly against your CMS.
Sometimes you want an audit, but sometimes an inventory is sufficient
As I see it, an audit implies some qualitative judgment on the content. In these cases, you certainly need a person to do that evaluation. But sometimes an inventory is sufficient, and these can be done in a more automated manner.
An inventory isn't necessarily a one-time endeavor
Sometimes an inventory really is an ad hoc and one time thing, but you should at least consider if you should create an infrastructure for an ongoing inventory.
Sometimes Excel isn't the best tool
Excel is great, and I frequently find myself using it. Again (and as always with any technology evaluation), it gets to what you want to accomplish.
