Audit used to be the hardest word

A content audit can serve a number of functions in supporting improved information management, ensuring that people have access to information that is current, reliable and accessible. This article is the first in a two-part series.

You know that rule of thumb that says if you haven’t worn something in two years then get rid of it? Wouldn’t it be great if we actually did this? But the simple truth is that aside from moving or simply storing things on the floor, we are lazy and don’t want to tidy up if we don’t have to.

And as lazy as we are with our wardrobes, we are lazy with our websites as well, allowing content to pile up on the server, with some pages never published, some images never referred to and lots of documents that are simply old and out of date.

This two-part series will look at content auditing for websites, starting with why do an audit, how and where to start, how to capture this goldmine of information and the benefits of auditing – both during and after the fact. An example will be used of an organisation that I worked with for several years where, despite the fact everyone agreed an audit was necessary, no one wanted to give up their favourite pair of jeans or part with that blazer last seen in an episode of Starsky and Hutch. We finally got it right on the third attempt and those items are now safely hanging in a charity shop archive, with no worries that they will resurface.

Coming to terms with the audit

Audit can be a dirty word for many companies and individuals. Just look at the track records of audits in the last several years. Enron. Worldcom. Your taxes. In most cases, the auditor is undertaking this activity because suspicions were aroused somewhere along the line. No one voluntarily says, “Hey, I think I’ll ask someone to audit my records and see what they find.”

Of course, rarely are records in a state that is easily auditable. And it is precisely this attitude to towards information management that has left many organisations in a situation where they have thousands of documents on their servers, taking up space and containing what might be useful content. But they’ll never know because as pages were added and edits made, a structure wasn’t in place to keep content organised or archived. As a result, many organisations are finding themselves on the wrong side of information compliance regulations.

Why audit?

There are many factors that contribute to why you should audit your site. If you are reading this article and are faced with an upcoming audit of some kind, I will share with you some handy tips that should enable you to carry out a more comprehensive audit. Here are a few common reasons why you should audit your site.

Servers = dumping grounds

I recently saw a photo of a dump containing thousands of refrigerators. No one bothered to dispose of them the right way, they just tipped them out of the back of the lorry onto a huge pile until eventually, the pile took over and the dump site was unmanageable. Sound familiar? This certainly describes many web servers I have seen and worked on over the past decade.

About four or five years ago, the trend was to have a central web team maintaining content for an organisation. Then, content-management systems (CMS) became fashionable, not to mention easier to use, and the central team became smaller and distributed authoring became popular, allowing the business content owners to start adding pages themselves. But few companies put an infrastructure in place at the time to support or manage this content, which has led to a big pile of content sitting on web servers that is now unmanageable. In most cases, information cannot deleted without contravening one of the myriad compliance regulations that dominate today’s corporate landscape. The question remains, how do we stack them neatly and retire them correctly?

Users = bad experiences

It goes without saying that too much content can be a bad thing. Especially when it’s out of date and sprawling across your website and intranet.

Over the past few years, many companies have made staff reductions. But combine the popularity of distributed authoring with a redundant workforce and you end up with content that isn’t maintained anymore, still has links to e-mail addresses of old staff members and multiple versions of documents that have been filed according to an out-of-date organisational structure.

Site out of date = credibility problems

Out of date content is infuriating for both internal and external users. Allowing content to stagnate, even if it is still the right content, can lead to credibility problems. Many companies must, by law, keep content online, but auditing it periodically and refreshing the ‘sell-by’ date can help ensure your users think of you in the right light.

CMS = new

With so many organisations re-evaluating their need for a CMS or revamping their current system, the task of content migration begs the audit question. A company I worked for had the unenviable task of moving from a two-year-old, bespoke CMS run by a vendor in another country, with content in multiple languages, to an in-house supported version of Interwoven with a reduction in staff from 23 to eight. The bespoke CMS had become unwieldy, particularly given the fact that staff members had failed to archive content or use standard naming conventions for pages and images. Looking a little deeper, it also became apparent that content had very little usable metadata, the directory file structure was not configured according to the site’s information architecture, and old pages had not been expired, meaning they could still be reached via the site’s search engine.

The only way to tackle this unwieldy monster was by conducting a rather lengthy audit – the staff member who drew the shortest straw set out to uncover the treasures awaiting us on the web server. But there were no treasures and we had to scrap everything and start again.

Content migration is one of the biggest reasons why CMS implementations overrun both time and budget, but conducting an audit well ahead of picking the system can help you get a head start. There are even companies that now specialise in content migration prior to installing a CMS.

Site = re-launching

Again, just like implementing a new CMS, a site re-design is an ideal time to conduct an audit. While you’re shuffling around the IA and navigation, why not take a moment to take inventory? Compare content on paper, agree a file and naming structure, and put in place an archiving/ auto-expiry process. It will pay off in the long run.

Competitors = benchmarking

An audit is a good tool for determining how your site compares to those of your competitors. In essence, a content audit will enable you to audit your content.

Search technology = orphaned

Finally, in my “why bother with a content audit” list, I would like to highlight something that has often caused website managers the greatest embarrassment. Orphans. Those pages that exist on your site but cannot be reached via your information architecture or site navigation.

With search technology improving all the time, it may only be a matter of time before this information falls into the wrong hands. Add to this fact that most temporary sites hold sensitive corporate information, such as those put up to cover company mergers or acquisitions, and the risks become even greater.

How to conduct an audit

So how do you go about undertaking an audit of what may be a seemingly unwieldy file server full of years of updates and no real structure? While there is no easy answer to this, I will provide some practical tips based on my personal experience.

Getting started

Get stakeholder buy-in – this is, of course, the most important thing for almost any project. If your organisation is structured in a way that has the IT department or even a third party overseeing your server, getting them involved at the beginning is a must.

It is also important to involve the right authors and content owners at the very beginning of the project. In the telecommunications company I used to work for, we had more than ten countries updating their content in different languages. So starting an audit with them on board proved critical to the project’s success because I didn’t speak ten languages and needed their input for the new structure.

Put a freeze on content – again, this sounds obvious, but it’s much harder to hit a moving target. If an all-out freeze is impossible, negotiate a freeze for parts of the site while you take a snapshot of them – but be careful to track changes after the audit is complete and before the new structure is in place.

Assign sections to relevant content owners – at the risk of spelling out the really obvious, ask the content owners to do the auditing. The second audit (yes, second) that was conducted at the telecommunications company I worked for was instigated from the top down. This was a poor decision, with many content owners feeling alienated from the audit process.

Update your information architecture – once you have a snapshot of all the content on your server, it’s critical you update your IA. While this may seem like a pointless exercise given the likelihood of everything changing, it is a critical step to establishing the correct data relationships for the audit and future requirements. It’s always easier to compare like for like and this is the best way to map old to new – especially during a data-migration project into a new CMS.

Audit all your images – this can be a large undertaking, especially if your organisation purchases images for corporate use. At my previous company, we had so many images on the server we were literally running out of space. Because these files take up so much space and change frequently, particularly if you have a daily or weekly update to your home page, things can quickly become unmanageable.

Initially, it can help to audit images according to their subject area – people talking on phone, people pointing into the air, etc. These can then be divided according to file size, which can be useful for sites that have style guide and image size restrictions.

Include databases – while database information is usually kept separate and simply pulled into the web page dynamically, it’s good practice to include these and their owners in an audit. This will ensure they are kept abreast of what’s happening to the ‘wrappers’ for their data.

Use metrics software to understand usage patterns, downloads - during the audit process it is useful to validate the findings of the content auditors by using metrics software to analyse the usage patterns of pages as well. This will give you an argument for taking pages down and provide you with some metrics that can be fed into any future usability testing.

In the next instalment in this series, I will focus on what happens after the audit – moving on and staying organised. Meanwhile, if you have any content-audit stories to share, please e-mail me at lynda@foursquaremedia.net.

Lynda Rathbone is managing director of Four Square Media, a strategic technology services consultancy. The company offers a wide ranges of services that focus on content and information management. Previously, Linda was director of the global internet group, Cable & Wireless.