The Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation (CMEI) recommends that its offices conduct periodic content inventories and analyses of their websites. These will identify content that needs to be updated, edited, added, or removed.
CMEI asks that all Web Coordinators and their teams review their websites' content at least once a year as part of their annual website maintenance. Ultimately, it ensures that your team is:
- Aware of what they currently have online and what they're responsible for
- Confident that all of the content they have posted is relevant
- Actively removing content that is no longer helpful.
Content Inventories
A content inventory is a document or spreadsheet that lists all of the content on your website. Inventories can range from simple to complex, and can include any information about your website that your team wants to track. Typically, they list the web pages on the website, navigation labels, and URLs.
Creating an Inventory with the Energy.gov Content Management System
You can use the Energy.gov Content Management System (CMS) to generate a simple content inventory. To do this:
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Log in to the CMS.
Navigate to the "Content" tab on the administrator toolbar.
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Set filter criteria.
Select your office under the "Group Membership" filter, and then click the Filter button. The list of filtered office pages will populate.
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Export to CSV.
Click the orange "CSV" button at the bottom left of the screen. The CMS will begin exporting the data. This can take several minutes depending on size of office site. Once data has been exported, the CMS will redirect you to the Energy.gov homepage. The link to download the CSV file is located directly beneath the hero image.
Manually Create a Readable, User-Friendly Inventory
If you want to create a readable content inventory that shows your website's structure, you will need to do this manually. Create your own inventory or use CMEI's content inventory template.
CMEI's template mirrors the way a website is put together, with each section of the website grouped together with its navigation labels and subpages. This gives you a visual representation of where pages are, what they're linked to, and what sections they belong to.
Content Analysis
Content analysis is the process of reviewing every page on your website and deciding if it needs to be updated. It is often helpful to create a content inventory first, and then use it to review each page for accuracy, usefulness, audience appropriateness, CMEI writing standards and best practices, user friendliness, and whether it meets an office's website goals. Also consider:
- Gaps. Are users looking for information that isn't on your website? Are important topics not covered (or not covered in enough detail)?
- ROT. ROT is an acronym that means redundant, outdated, and trivial content. ROT should be updated or removed.
- Ways to improve popular content. What is your most popular and in-demand content? How can you improve it?
- Underperforming content. Are any of your pages valuable and accurate, but not performing well? Are there ways to improve how they perform in search engines? Are there best practices that can be applied to make the content more clearly written or more readable?
Google Analytics can be used to help you analyze relevant user behavior—such as page views and bounce rate—for each page. This may help you identify pages that need attention.
Content Analysis Tips
- On very large websites, consider reviewing one section at a time.
- Use content analysis to identify year-long goals for website improvement.
- Identify "quick wins" by finding what content, if any, can be archived immediately.