Ever heard of a content inventory? How about a content audit? If you’ve ever redesigned your website you should have. They are two key building blocks to a successful website and should be a requirement for all web projects.

So what are they?
It’s pretty simple really—in a content inventory you take stock of all the content on your site and in a content audit you review all of that content for quality and relevancy.

When conducting a content inventory you go through a site, page-by-page, and record all of the copy, images, files, URLs, movies, etc. It’s not the most exciting thing in the world, but it is usually an eye opening experience, especially when you haven’t looked at your site content in a while.

In a content audit you’ll have to take a good, hard look at the existing content and decide if it’s any good. Is it clear, concise, written well for the web, and most importantly, information that your customers actually want and need? If it is, great, but more often than not you’ll find yourself with a need to create new content.

Sounds time consuming—why should I bother?
Well, for starters your content is one of the most important elements on your website, much more important than the design. It’s why people visit in the first place, so it’s critical that it’s well written and relevant to your customers. Unfortunately, more often than not, website content is an afterthought—written at the end of the project. By that time you’re writing content to fit the site design and architecture instead of writing it to fit the customer’s needs. That’s why it’s key to do the inventory and audit at the start of the project.

Completing these deliverables at the beginning of the project lets you know what you have to work with, which in turn gives you a more realistic idea of project costs and timelines. You’ll know how much content you have to create and you’ll be able to create it in conjunction with the design, leading to a more cohesive end product. It reduces the amount of surprises at the end of a project and just makes everyone happier in the long run. Those are big rewards for a relatively small amount of work.