Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Getting it WRONG: Lessons Learned from Building a Web Content Audit Tool

 Paulo Fernandes, Co-founder of Luscious Orange, said that they decided to build a content audit tool. Found that most tools focused on tech and metrics (automate it and add AI) and removed humans from the equation. Content audits exists in mashups of spreadsheets, tracking tools, and notes. 

Had to build a crawler first. Crawling is easy. Interpretation is hard. Computers don't have context to ignore what is not necessary to know about content. 

Most people don't know about sitemal.xml. CMSs generate it. Is a list of all files. A page on a website is not always the same as a page in a sitemap. A page does not need to be in your navigation to be visible to the whole world. 

A link and a file are not the same thing. Inventory is just a bunch of URLs. HTML has tags that can point to other resources. A file can exist on your server that is never linked. A link can exist on your site that points to nothing. 

Asset inventory is different from content inventory. 

Automation is great, but content audits are human work. AI can;t help with items that require deep context.

Audits generate tasks. Leverage all the great stuff that we already know about task management.

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