Tag: content audit

Website Redesign

Audit, Rework, Edit, Do ALL THE THINGS

Get Ready image courtesy of “How to Win in Pacman” https://www.wikihow.com/Win-in-Pac-Man

There’s nothing that makes the web team tetchier than when a client says: “We need a complete website redesign.” Want to know why? It’s ‘cause there are so many possible meanings rolled up into that phrase. We need a few more specifics.

Are you talking about actual design—colors, fonts, images? Or do you mean you want to rework content? Are you concerned about navigation? Is there a feature you think everyone would use that doesn’t currently exist?

I often find that people have a hard time identifying what’s not working; they just have an idea about how it’s “supposed” to work and they want it “fixed” yesterday.

To help you all with that, we’ve come up with an outline of our ideal website audit and rework process, because it involves multiple things. While you can break some of these down into smaller projects themselves, if you don’t keep the first step in mind, you are losing the trees for the weeds.

STEP 1: DISCOVER/DEFINE

Pac Man and a few fellows: ghosts, food, surely some accessories will come along as well…

The discovery process helps us define what we want to accomplish as well as who our users are and what they need. Most major flaws in website design and structure occur because this first initial step is skipped. You also need to focus on your largest audience.

  1. What is the purpose of the site, desired outcomes, or success measures?
  2. Who are our audiences? Who is our largest audience?
  3. What are our audiences’ top tasks? When they visit the site, what are the most important things they are hoping to do?
  4. What is the overall timeline?

Once again, it’s easy to become overly focused on tactics—replacing images, adding content, moving widgets—as opposed to actually defining what the measure of success is for your website.

STEP 2: RESEARCH

All the Pac Man characters you may encounter in the game; image courtesy of common domain; find original on http://villains.wikia.com/wiki/Ghosts_(Pac-Man)

Now you figure out how people are interacting with your current site, more specific behaviors your users have, and maybe some dirt on your competitors. Some of these steps can be streamlined however. Use your time judiciously!

  1. Do some user/UX testing to see how your current site is performing. This can help you identify problem areas.
  2. Review existing analytics to see what users are doing on your site and what pages they consider most important.
  3. Review existing web content, including a content audit. We are happy to assist with this.
  4. Create some user stories/jobs-to-be-done. Think through what a user needs to accomplish when they come to your website. Try to pick a few different users/tasks to represent your audience/s.
  5. OPTIONAL: Review your biggest competitors.*
  6. OPTIONAL: Review what sets you apart from your competitors.*

Keep this other thing in mind as well: Just because someone else is doing it, doesn’t mean it’s working for their users.

People often want what they like and have to have what they think is best. That’s nice and all, but this site isn’t about us; it’s about our users. (I know—it’s depressing. It’s like film actors and screenwriters, whose favorite scenes end up on the cutting room floor, or writers, whose best bits get edited out of the action.)

STEP 3: OUTLINE

Multiple different versions or levels of the Pac Man game; image courtesy of common domain masonicGITpacman game https://github.com/masonicGIT/pacman

This step complements the research you have previously done and helps you create a true map of user flows, content hierarchy, and priorities.

  1. Do some card sorting or tree testing or other types of testing to explore terminology, labeling, and the best navigation structure. It doesn’t have to be really fancy actually, you can do some on-the-fly testing with friends and neighbors that will tell you a lot, just by watching them complete some tasks.
  2. Define goals for each website page type (examples include education, about, news, and the like).
  3. Determine what content needs to be pruned out and archived.
  4. Determine what additional content is needed. Once again, USE CAUTION. It’s best to get a product out quickly even if it’s minimal and then add onto it.
  5. Build a sitemap with appropriate content hierarchies. This sounds difficult, but it’s about prioritizing what content is the most important for your users and featuring it up front or highest up in folder structure.

Priorities are SO WICKED IMPORTANT. If your site is perfect when you publish it, it’s too late. Everyone else will either have moved on or that thing you spent hours and hours perfecting will be out of date by the time you publish.

STEP 4: IMPLEMENT

Pacman and ghosts cross-stitched
Cross stitched by yours truly. I may have to make some more…

The pitfalls in this step mainly involve coddling the perfectionists. You will be most successful if you emphasize the need to produce a minimum viable product or, in other words, get the simplest version out there right away and add to it (iterate). This way you won’t be held up by others’ caveats.

  1. Assign writers to write/rewrite/edit content.
  2. Rework page structures. (Carefully! There are some pitfalls to this, especially when working on a timed roll-out plan with a live site.)
  3. Get sign-offs from stakeholders on changes/website pages in the test environment. (If you have a test environment open only to certain users. If not, no sweat!)
  4. Schedule redirects from pages to be archived to newly structured folders/pages. Using redirects tells Google where you have moved content on your site relevant to your users. It helps you retain link equity that previous content has earned (SEO optimization tool).
  5. Publish live!! And throw a party!
  6. Run spell checks and broken link checks.

CONGRATS!!! But—it doesn’t actually end here. Just FYI. There’s maintenance, content guidelines and editorial processes to determine (governance), workflows to figure out, and so much more. It gets out of hand so quickly! Like a child with a set of permanent markers or a cat who finds where you hid the treat bag…

Here’s wishing you the best of luck!

 

*This process can be very time consuming and can take precedence over everything else. Do NOT let it overwhelm what you need to accomplish.

**Extra byline for Mike Rockwood here who threw his hands up and said “I’ll outline it for you!” at least, metaphorically.

^Initially published on University of Utah Health’s intranet Pulse

The Art of the Content Audit

Originally published on Pulse, University of Utah Health’s intranet, June 12, 2017, this is a case study about a content audit for the Women’s Health Services website at University of Utah Health.

Content, if you haven’t noticed, is a complex beast. For example, we spend a lot of time focusing on good content, what it is, where we get it from, and how we deploy it. But we spend less time than we ought on considering the outcome we want from the content we curate and post.

A content audit is a tool that allows us to review the content we have and take its pulse. It’s a great benchmarking tool with which to craft and test which content pieces are performing the best and where there might be gaps in the content. If there is important content missing that would benefit our users, a content audit is likely to reveal this.

Goals​

For our content audits [at University of Utah Health], we have identified these specific goals:

  • Reduce number of website pages with thin or low-performing content
  • Combine pages with thin content OR flesh these pages out, depending on website goals
  • Archive pages that are out of date, no longer applicable, or very low performing
  • Identify areas where we might want to add content

Where to Start

An audit can be as in depth or concise as the site necessitates. You can also tailor the information you collect in the audit to fit your overall site goals. The typical content audit might include these items:

  • Analytics
    • Page views
    • Time on page
    • Bounce Rate
  • SEO factors
    • Meta title & length
    • Meta description & length
    • H1 heading
    • H2 heading
    • Subtitles: additional use?
    • Word count
  • Content type (video, form, text, etc.)
  • Contact information
  • Images
    • Type of image
    • Image alt text
  • Affiliated documents
  • Duplicate content
  • Last modified

We determined to add in these additional audit points as particularly applicable to our patient-facing sites:

  • Call to action
  • Referring physician link included?
  • Specialist list included?
  • Related MBM specialty?
  • Affiliated service line
  • Affiliated marketing campaign
  • Affiliated research or other programs
  • Any additional content
    • Patient experience story included?
    • Health Feed/Scope inclusion? [U of U Health blog and podcast respectively]
    • Related tags to Health Feed/Scope
    • Clinical trials inclusion?
    • Patient education?
    • Vendor library content included?

Once you have outlined what you would like to inventory, you can begin to collect the data.* Take a look at the content inventory for our women’s health services website:

Redacted content audit women's health
What the full content audit looks like for women’s health services; please forgive the omission of analytics data!

Now that we’ve inventoried the content (rather exhaustively), we can examine how each piece is performing and make some assumptions as to whether the page should be kept, revised, or removed.

Example: Content About Midwives

Previously, we had two website pages about midwives on our women’s health services site.​ The page /what-is-a-certified-nurse-midwife.php receives far fewer page views than the /midwives.php page. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly as the time on page is over 1 minute. That’s a lot of time in our virtual ‘verse. So the content is important to those who are looking at it, even though the page doesn’t receive a lot of traffic.

In this case rather than get rid of the content, we are going to optimize it by moving it onto a page with more visibility, in this case /midwives.php. This should increase the main midwife page’s value while indicating to Google that we have both updated our site and checked our content for accuracy. (When search engines crawl websites they look for a number of factors that might tell the importance of the webpage. One of these factors is the date the page was last modified.)​

Webpage featuring content about midwifery (or midwives) on University of Utah Health’s women’s services website

The sticky navigation (a navigation bar stays with you as you scroll down the page) allows readers to access all the content about midwives and our services without leaving this page for another. Thus we’ve consolidated a low-performing, but important, page into the content with which it fits, letting the search engine know that we’ve updated the content by modifying the page, while keeping content that is clearly valuable for our readers.

End Objective: Increase Quality of Page Visits

This is just one page treatment out of many options that we might use when it comes to structuring content. All of the content audit goals lead to the most important objective of our content strategy: increase not just traffic to the website, but the quality of the traffic; namely, we want this content to show up for the right people at the right time in the right place.

Where Do We Go Next?

What happens after an audit? We look at the recommendations we’ve made after reviewing each page and determine who is responsible for whatever action needs to be taken. We also track the progress of the content updates.​

Ideally, we apply this process to all our websites on a regular basis, ensuring that our content remains up to date and within best practices.

And that, my friends, is the short of it (the long is all wrapped up in all that data and detail gathering). In the next few months, we’ll keep checking in on this content to see how the website data analytics change (usually we must allow about six months to get a relatively accurate picture of how the content is performing—performance has leveled out by then after the significant changes have been made to the site by then).

*I’m afraid I’ve had to redact the data here; I’m sure you understand!.