The purpose of a website, simply put, is to provide information to those looking for that information.

It is assumed that you have gone through Building a Shared Vision with your team in the project discovery & kickoff stage and then have created the document to provide to web services. The next steps are to audit, map and outline your website. As you develop these three documents, you want to rank the most important information you need to convey to the least important. If you have an existing website, you will want to ask for the analytics for your site to determine what is most used and what isn’t.

This part of the process requires your expertise as the subject matter expert and has three parts: auditing, mapping, and outlining the information for the website. If this is a brand new website, please skip to the outline section. 

In some cases, you may also need further visualizations that can be found by looking at your Information Architecture.

Each section below has a task associated with it and requires your team to put together an excel spreadsheet of the information. Please email us at web@otc.edu if you have any questions while you work through this process. 

1. Content Auditing

Why Perform a Content Audit?

Why perform a content audit? Simply put: simplify, simplify, simplify. A content audit helps you determine if your content is relevant – both to users and to your departmental goals.

Essentially, a content audit helps shape your content by using the data we gathered during our research to help you assess where your website is and where you want it to be. Then, simplify everything down to only what is essential.

A content audit and later content mapping will help you determine:

  • What content is the priority?
  • Which pages need copywriting / editing?
  • Which pages need to be updated?
  • Which pages should be consolidated?
  • Which pages are no longer needed?
  • Does your content align with the needs of your users?

Evaluating Your Current Content

A content audit is the cornerstone of your content strategy. It is a qualitative analysis of all of the published content on your website. It allows you to catalog and analyze that content on a page-by-page basis.

It also helps you evaluate your current content by answering some key questions: Is this content accurate and consistent? Does it speak in the voice you want to project?

You will also use it to complete the content mapping task later in the process.

Completing Your Content Audit

AUDIT EXAMPLE (.PDF) or
AUDIT TEMPLATE (EXEL)

Step 1: Find your content

  • If you have a way to pull up all the published pages on your site, then use this to complete the audit. Most website users can log in to their content system and click on pages to see a list. 
  • Another option is to visit the site map for the site. Replace the URL in this example with yours. So for example https://about.otc.edu/page-sitemap.xml could also be https://students.otc.edu/financialaid/page-sitemap.xml Contact web@otc.edu if you need an example URL for your pages. Note that all pages listed in the site map are active showing to the public. In many cases, you will find old pages that have been inadvertently left active by the unit content manager. This is a great time to move those to a non-public version-like draft. 

Step 2: Enter all the URLs on the spreadsheet in the “Page URL” column

Step 3: Evaluate the content on each page

When reviewing current content, consider these questions to help you evaluate your content.

  • What type of content is it?
  • What topics are covered?
  • Who is the page’s primary intended audience? 
  • What is the purpose of the page?

Step 4: Fill in the content type

  • Ask yourself what is the set-up of the page – Examples: homepage, an informational text page, story page (content that gets added frequently like news or blogs), list of links, staff directory, webform, tables, graphic element, calendar of events, photo gallery, etc.

Step 5: Fill in the topic

  • Ask yourself what the topic of the information is on the page — this helps us group pages that have related topics.

Step 6: Fill in the audience

  • Ask yourself who needs this information — Examples: current students, prospective students, faculty, staff, public, alumni, etc.

Step 7: Fill in the purpose

  • Ask yourself why you have this page — Examples: general information, introduction to a program, attend an event, join a group, fill out a form

2. Content Mapping

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.

3. Content Outline

Creating an outline of your website is paramount to understanding what information will be communicated and how that information will be communicated. When everything appears to be important, nothing will be important. You must clarify the information so that, web services can develop the best website for your intended use.

An outline should be done for each website and major bullet points should be limited. The current design for all OTC websites limits main links to a maximum of 6 major icons. However, since websites have become more vertical, there are other ways to address this information. For example, the OTC Registrar’s office recently went through a redesign of their site. Below are two different outlines. 

Main Sub Menu Outline

  • Request Transcript
  • Graduation
  • Registration Info
  • Student Academic Calendar
  • Faulty/Staff Resources
  • FAQs

This would be the blue horizontal menu (or vertical on mobile) seen at https://students.otc.edu/registrar/

This page has other components to help connect the information to visitors. This includes*: 

  • Contact Us / Our Team
  • How Do I 
  • Get Help Now
  • Registrar Resource Links
  • Registrar Forms
  • Student Resource Links

The overall outline would look something like the following: 

  1. Request an Official Transcript
    1. Transcript Key
    2. Unofficial Transcripts
  2. Graduation
    1. Apply for Graduation
    2. Diplomas – order a Duplicate Diploma
  3. Registration Information
    1. Registration Checklist
    2. Registration dates
    3. Waitlisting
    4. Prerequisites and Waivers
    5. Instructor Consent – Permission to Register
    6. Advisor Release to Register
      1. Academic Advising
    7. Course Load/Overload
    8. Class Schedule Key/Legend
    9. Change my Schedule (Add/Drop)
    10. Withdraw from OTC
      1. Withdrawing from Classes
      2. Administrative Withdrawal
      3. Late Withdrawal
      4. Withdrawing and your Financial Aid
    11. Class Schedules
    12. Registration myOTC Guides
    13. Paying for Classes
      1. Financial Aid
      2. Tuition and Fees
      3. Payment Plans
    14. Guided Self-Placement
    15. Auditing a Course
  4. Student Academic Calendar
  5. How Do I:
    1. Change my Academic Advisor
    2. Change my Admission/Enrollment Status
    3. Change my Degree Program (major)
    4. Change my Residency Status
    5. Change my Student Information (Name, address, phone, chosen name, etc.)
    6. Preferred (Chosen) name
    7. Deny or Release my Directory Information (FERPA HOLD)
      FERPA
    8. Grant Consent to Release my student record
      FERPA
    9. Request an Enrollment Verification
    10. Request to Repeat a Course
    11. Request a Non-Core 42 Substitution
    12. Request Academic Fresh Start
    13. Request Overload Permission
  6. Academic Standing – Probation
  7. Faculty Staff Resources for Colleague and myOTC
  8. Grades
    1. How to appeal a final grade
    2. Scholastic (Latin) Honors
  9. Notary Services
  10. Our Team
  11. Frequently Asked Questions

Putting together an outline, with ultimately help clarify exactly what you are trying to communicate and how web services can further help position your information through search and other marketing avenues to benefit the OTC system. 

*Information on websites frequently changes. When looking at the example of the Registrar’s outline please consider the spirit rather than the exact match of information to the current website.