I’ve been doing a lot of website content audits over the past year and decided it was time to simplify and create a labor-saving deliverable template that can capture the key insights and recommendations of nearly any content inventory and content audit. Who needs a content audit spreadsheet or slide deck when you can just sketch this handy Venn diagram? Share and enjoy, my content strategy and information architecture friends!
This format can be used for different kinds of sites, too, from an internal audit of your organization’s intranet to extranets that serve partners — even the content for your social media presence. What you put in each zone is up to you and can be as general or specific as you need, from broad categories such as FAQs to specific items such as a “funny picture of the CEO and his dog.”
Maybe this is good fro a high level presentation. However this is not going to work for a large scale website redesign /re skin.
Hopefully, no one will think they can or should use this template in actual work. The organizing principles represented in the diagram, however, are sound no matter the scale of the project. In fact, the reason I created the diagram was that while working on site for a retailer with nearly a million different products, both the creative team and the client were unnecessarily daunted by the size of the work. I felt we were losing sight of the basic concepts of assessing and optimizing content, so I drew this on a whiteboard to bring everyone back down to earth.
So glad you added this explanation, John. I do a LOT of communications audits for churches and judicatories and these are complex, detailed projects!
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Visualization is spot on. Will definitely be borrowing these principles. Thanks, John!
Simple and brilliant. And cute!