The older your site, the more layers of content you have. This is similar to the layers of rock you see when driving through the mountains that have been blasted through for the highway. Some layers may be harder and others softer. On the editorial side, perhaps you had different writing style, editorial focus, editorial standards and general quality under different editors. On the technical side, perhaps ten years ago you were using tables for your formatting, then one division started using Flash extensively, and another group was frustrated by the controls in the CMS so used JavaScript to rewrite the pages. This information is probably important for your content inventory.
Some of the reasons to capture this:
- Cutting content, either as a one-time or ongoing basis. The strata of content may be a key factor in your decisions.
- Website transformation or migration. Any time your content needs to change to enable a transformation on your website, you need to understand what the transformation needs will be, and the different layers of content probably need to be transformed differently. To use a simple example, if a whole site section that was created five years ago is heavily Flash-based, then the transformation there may need to beg entirely different than for another layer.
- Generally determining the quality. You may want to analyze your quality over time, perhaps even testing the impact of different approaches to content over time.
Before continuing on to ways of figuring out the layers, I wanted to point out why layers in particular is important rather than why you might just do counts of various aspects you want to test (these 10% have Flash, these 25% use tables for layout, etc). The primary reason is that it allows you to better look for patterns (for example, all the pages in this section use Flash and tables). Another reason to group by layers is that these are probably a way that internal stakeholders can wrap their heads around and make solid decisions.
Also, notice in the graphic above that if you look at the side you see slightly different layers than when you look from the front. So naturally what layers you see also depend on how you slice through your site. You may miss some important layers.
Figuring out your layers will depend on the specifics of your web presence, but here are some ways of figuring out layers:
- Age. This one is relatively easy to get (although getting the originally-posted date can be a challenge), and, if you're going to slice on just one metric then this is a good one to start with.
- Editor. Different editors may have dictated different content quality and focus.
- Systems. From a technical perspective, the system (or original system if it's already been migrated once) can have a huge impact on the underlying technical content quality.
- Site sections. Different subsites / sites / sections may have evolved separately (also see Rethinking the Content Inventory: Site Inventories).
- Scraping. Sometimes you just need to scrape content off of the page.
- Template versions. If you have consistently used a tool, then you may be able to see what template version they were on.
So don't just concentrate on the pretty green layer at the surface, but dig into your content to see the layers you've accumulated over time.
