The Web Project Guide: Know Your Content | Gather Insight From Your Metrics

Happy summer. Where last month we talked about knowing our people and their motivations, this month our planned chapter releases are focused on knowing your content and its connections to your users. That’s right, it’s time to talk content inventories and analytics.

Talking about data is difficult, because so much of it is noise. We reached out for help from our friend Jon Crowley to help center the chapter in purposeful metrics, rather than generic analytics, and found that (like so much of the web strategy process) the answers tend to be “IT DEPENDS.” We’re confident these two chapters will help you get your priorities straight when it comes to knowing what you’ve already got, even if you have to adjust it a bit to fit it in with your workflow and content model.

CHAPTER 7: Know Your Content
One of the challenges in rebuilding any website is figuring out what do with the existing content. But before you can do any analysis make any decisions, you simply need know what it all is. And once it’s unearthed and exposed, then you need to decide what information is relevant and worth recording, determine a method to store this information, and decide how (or if) you want to keep it updated over time.

CHAPTER 8: Gather Insight From Your Metrics
A website generates lots of numbers representing how visitors behave. What numbers are important, meaning what numbers can translate to some measure of “success” in non-numeric terms?

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