Why Map Your Content?

This is essentially the second phase of your content audit and focuses on aligning what current content you have with what content your end-users and department need. This phase should be tackled after you have conducted user research and have a clear understanding of your project requirements.

If you think of your website like a puzzle, through this process you have been gathering pieces to put your website together. You have come to understand your end-user and departmental requirements (green pieces) and what content you currently have (yellow pieces). Now it’s time to start putting the puzzle pieces together – matching the green and yellow pieces to see where you are missing puzzle pieces to make one complete website while weeding out the pieces you don’t need or don’t fit well together.

Evaluating Your Current Content

Step 1: Where does your old content fit into the new information architecture?

  • Using your old content audit and your new information architecture, determine where your old content will fit into the new structure using the section numbers from the new information architecture site map.
     
  • When making your decisions, ask yourself:
    • What is the purpose of the page?
    • Who is the page’s primary intended audience?
    • What topics are covered?
    • Is the information valuable, redundant, accurate, up-to-date?

Step 2: What do you need to do with this content?

  • Copy / move the content as is with no edits
  • Make edits/revisions to the content
  • Combine content from multiple pages
  • Delete content entirely
  • Move the content to intranet / blogs / Canvas

Step 3: What content needs to be developed?

  • Based on your old content and the new information architecture, determine what content is missing and will need to be created to complete your new website.