Content Audit

This is the process of taking stock of all the content of your site, for means of creating an effective “information architecture” for the site. Common areas of the website to think about are:

• Main home page/and logged in user homepage views
• Static pages such as terms and conditions and about pages
• User-registration
• Account login and user account or profile management
• User blog or content creation and management of their own content for sites which include elements of user generated content
• Website browsing and search results

Once you have inventory of all site content you can start to think about how it should all link together. Now you can move from a content inventory to a content “hierarchy”. Example ways to structure the site might: user category (branches in the hierarchy split off for each different category of site user), function, company organisational structure, or by content type.

From a content hierarchy you can move on to build the site map. To do this you need to decide how the content hierarchy relates to the navigation of the site. To complete the information architecture you should have wire-frames for each content type.