Taking inventory of your content
Conducting a content inventory can help you better understand your organization’s Mass.gov content. This can be useful for improving content organization and spotting duplications or gaps within it.
One example of why an organization might consider a content inventory is if it has a leadership transition, and references to the previous administration need to be replaced with those of the new administration. Another example would be that an organization comes to realize its content is outdated and disconnected, and needs to take a fresh look at it to make big and small improvements.
There is not a diagramming or site map tool built into the content management system to help you visualize how all your content fits together. However, you can use the CMS to compile a list of all your Mass.gov pages and documents, and then sort them in various ways.
Search “All Content” (or “All Documents”)
The most basic way to get a view of your organization’s content is to conduct a search under the “All Content” tab in the navigation bar. (You can do likewise for documents under “All Documents.”)
From there, filter by Organization, and perhaps by Publication status, if you don’t want unpublished or pre-published content to display.
After you hit Apply, your list of results will appear. This could be a long list.
Scroll to the bottom of the screen and select the orange CSV button.
This will generate a link to download a spreadsheet containing your data.
You can use the spreadsheet to review your content inventory. The spreadsheet contains columns matching most of the filter fields under “All Content,” plus a few more, including Last revised date, Last revised status, and perhaps most useful, page views over the past month and a content URL.
Under the “Data” tab on your spreadsheet, you can sort the contents to view pages by number of page views, content type, or whatever makes it easiest for you to make sense of your content collection. You may, for example, want to get a sense of how many higher-level pages (Service, Organization, etc.) you have, or focus on content that gets the most traffic.
You can add sheets to your spreadsheet to view content according to various categories, such as your audiences (residents, businesses, etc.).
Depending upon your spreadsheet savvy, you can color code page titles to identify those you want to keep, revise, or get rid of. You might add columns to your spreadsheet to include notes about plans for existing or future content.
In doing a complete content inventory, you might want to filter separately under “All Content” for certain words in the Title field so as to identify content from other organizations that could make sense to link to from your organization’s pages. There may be no need to create new pages or documents if they already exist in the CMS.
Visualizing your content
If visualizing your content inventory through some sort of diagramming or site map tool would be helpful, you’ll need to look for a third-party tool.
Examples of free tools include Miro boards and Google Drawings.
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