 Can you hear me okay? All right. Not really. Is that better? Better? Better? Too much? OK, I'm going to rely on you, because I can't tell how loud it is in the back of the room. Louder? I can scoot forward. Does that help a little bit? It doesn't go up. Is this OK? Otherwise, I can hold it. OK. Holler, if you can't hear us, because we want you to hear us this whole time. Well, welcome to the ultimate super-duper guide to content quality, which is a content strategy thing. Before we get started, I have a couple of questions for you to get a sense of who's in the room and just to learn a little bit about you. So don't be shy. Get your arms out. I'm going to ask you to raise your hands. So first of all, would you raise your hand if you've worked on a site or a product that has really excellent content? Yeah. Awesome. Lots of you out there, at least half the room. And what about those of you, me included, who has worked on a site or a product with not-so-great content? I've got, like, a friend. OK, it's like almost everyone. Yeah, definitely me included. OK, and then two more questions. So how many of you have heard of a content audit or a content inventory? Heard those words thrown around. Awesome. And then how many of you have actually gone through the pain of doing a content inventory or a content audit? Awesome. So maybe a quarter of us. Lots of experience in the room. This is great. Well, before we get too far in, you might be wondering who the heck is up here in front of you. First of all, I'm Courtney. I am the Managing Director of User Experience at Forum One. We have a team of eight or nine user experience folks who are doing this day in and day out. And I've been doing user experience for about a decade. I'm mostly working with nonprofits, foundations, and government agencies. And I think at the heart of UX is really this content quality, either opportunity or problem, depending on how you look at it. Always opportunity. That's right. And hi, everybody. I'm lurking over by the wall over here. I'll be doing more later, though, I promise. My name is Christina. And I'm something of a hybrid. I've got a really lame title. It's Senior Creative Strategist, which means nothing or exactly what I want it to mean whenever I want it to mean it. I'm at Forum One with Courtney. And I've got a background in editorial strategy and user experience design and kind of mixing the two as often as possible, because I think they go hand in hand. Backgrounds in journalism and in science journalism in particular come from MIT, so I've been all over the place doing all sorts of things. I'll be back. And like we said, we work for Forum One. At Forum One, we design and build lots of cool stuff. These are some of our clients, like I said, in the sort of nonprofit foundation, government agency realm. And we just celebrated our 20th anniversary just, I think, a day or two ago when our founder thinks, yeah, 20 years. I thought it was literally great. But celebrating our founder bought Forum One.com and was like, I think this internet thing's going to be huge, guys. So in those years, we've learned a few things specifically around content quality. So before we get too deep, I just want to define what the head content is. The way that we're talking about it is it's basically all things that can live on your website or on your product that are usually consumed by visitors. So oftentimes when people hear content, they think about copy, headers, body text. But we're also including images, video, audio, graphics, sounds, all of that stuff. So we're talking about the big definition of content when we talk about this stuff. And as far as we're concerned, content quality is vital. It's paramount. Content quality is vital to a good user experience for sites and products, and also to a really excellent customer experience. As we heard Dries talk about in the Dries note, and then Sarah mentioned this in this morning's keynote. So content quality is really vital to an excellent experience period. But it's vital to people and machines. We spend a lot of time designing things. And unfortunately, people aren't coming to your website or to your product to really enjoy that navigation you designed, or really get in deep to the taxonomy that took months to approve and implement. They're actually there for the content. They're looking for something specific, or maybe they're trying to complete an action. And so content quality is really vital to the people. That's what they're coming for. The second thing is content quality is also vital to machines. So when we think about how are people getting to your website, is it via a Google search? Is it via a newsletter? And then how is that content being stored and maintained within a CMS probably or a database? Those are the machines that we're talking about, the search engines, the CMSs, and other tools like that. Content quality also matters a lot to machines as well. Now, this isn't a revolutionary statement. It shouldn't be surprising. But my gosh, it's a really hard thing to do. And it's a hard thing to master. And people struggle with it all the time. Like we saw everyone raising their hands about sites where you're working with not-so-great content. And why do people struggle with it? There are a lot of reasons. A lot of it comes down to time, to workflows, and the people involved in those workflows. And sometimes the amount of content, like I've worked on plenty of sites where it's just overgrown and unmanageable. But I've also worked on sites where there is not enough. There are empty pages. And so there are a lot of reasons. But ultimately today, we're here to talk about two things. First, the elements that define content quality. And then the second thing is our approach to assessing content quality. So let's dig in. We have refined our list of how we define quality down to six elements. So I'm gonna break those down and share a couple of examples. Number one is structure. So what we're talking about is how content's marked up, the code behind it. Is that what your developer looks like? No, I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. So, I mean, you probably know what H tags and P tags are, but are you using them correctly? Are you using an H1 tag only for the page title and making sure that you're not using it anywhere else on the page? Are you using alt tags for your images? Are you ensuring that it conveys the content and the function and that it's succinct and accurate? You know, how the content is marked up is vital, that structure. So let me give you a quick example. This is a guy we'll call him Rumpy. He is a yellow-rumped warbler. And let's pretend that we want to write up a description of him so that birdwatchers sort of know how to spot him when they see him out when they're on a hiking trail or something. So on the left side, you see the structure of that description. On the right side, you see what the visitors see when they're coming to that site. So on the left side, you'll see in blue the structure that we're talking about, right? H1, H2, the P tags. And in both areas, you see that it's helping convey the hierarchy. On the left side, it's the hierarchy that machines need to be able to read it and serve that up to you in a search engine or for a screen reader. And then on the right side, you know, breaking that text apart is really important so we can actually read it and consume it easily. And so the summary is like, of course, yeah, you need structure. When you correctly structure your content, it means that both humans and machines can actually read it. I've added these summary slides because we probably all know these things, but what inevitably happens on any project when you're trying to tackle these really big issues, inevitably you'll be either, I've had these moments, or your boss will have a moment and be like, why the heck are we doing this? Does this matter? Let's confirm we're tackling the right problem. And so having these summaries helps to make sure you can always answer that question. Ultimately, with structure, we're talking about accessibility and SEO. Number two, presentation looks do matter in this case. So presentation is actually what you're looking at, how it feels, how it looks and feels. This is referencing cleanly designed content. So is it cluttered? Is the important stuff clear and obvious? Is it easy to digest? Does it fit in well with the page, especially when we're talking with images? Is it structured nicely? So back to our example with Rumpy, the yellow-rumped warbler. On the left side, you'll see the before. And on the right side, you'll see we've added some of this presentation, these styles, to make it easier to consume. So there are pretty obvious things here, right? Like the headline that has the name, yellow-rumped warbler, it's all caps. We've changed the color. The Latin name, we've made italic and smaller to establish an even clearer hierarchy. We've reduced the line length to make it easier to consume. So again, in summary, presentation, clearly presented content, it's easier and it's more enjoyable to read. It's not a pain to try and scan the page and find what you're looking for. So we're talking about legibility and the overall experience. Number three, clarity. Okay, do people even know what you're saying or what they're consuming here? So this is important also for humans and machines. A lot of what this means is how direct your content is. Is it full of jargon? Is it empathetic? Sort of some of the things that Sarah talked about this morning. Are you using overly flowery words when you actually don't need to? Are you using a lot of acronyms? Is everything spelled right? Those are important things. And again, this should be a no-brainer, but I can't tell you how many pages I've looked at on other people's sites that I don't know what that acronym means and I don't know what that jargon term means and you need to make sure your audiences can actually understand it. This is important too around machine translation. So if you're using idioms or something's being translated to another language, those are things you need to consider that clarity is vital. Back to our example. So some of the things we did in this description text, you can see we crossed out some things in red. We simplified some of the words. So for example, in the opening line, it says four closely related North American forms. Well, let's just call them birds instead of forms. That's probably better. Instead of using the word periodically, we replaced it with sometimes. And then there was a lot of text and parentheses that had the species name and we decided to cut that out because it interrupted the flow. So this is an example of how you might inject some clarity into your text or your copy. So in summary, why are we doing this? Well, you want people to actually understand it. You want it to flow nicely. And the goal is to improve comprehension. People can actually digest it. Number four, keywords. And when we say keywords, we're not going to tell you to put all of them in. You'll notice here it says use the right terms and it's okay to use those often. So we want to be smart with keyword usage. We want to make sure that you should hopefully be doing research around your audiences and be able to either, maybe you've talked to them about it, maybe you've observed them or maybe you can predict some of their behavior. But understanding when they're looking for your content, what are they typing in the Google search? Those are the words that you actually want to be using in your text. Important things to consider. And that's words and phrases. So again, this helps people. It also helps the machines, the search engines. And Google prioritizes useful and unique content. So it's an important thing to consider. So here, sorry it's a little hard to see. The pink text indicates some of the phrases and the keywords. So the word warblers in there four or five times. North American birds, that's an important phrase. And then the full name, so yellow-romped warbler, making sure we're including that. Okay, so again, consistently using smart and appropriate keywords. Not jamming at full, but picking a few and making sure you're using them smartly and using them well. And it's so people can find you more easily so they get the message. Number five is voice. This is kind of a fun one. To make it your own, to add the personality of your brand. So in this case, I apologize for the profanity. In this case, when we say voice, we're talking about what makes it unique. What's the character or the personality of it? This is the part where you make it your own. And Google likes content with a unique perspective. So in this case, the example is quite nice. And as we're adapting the content, we actually pulled what Autobahn has on the right. So on the left is the before and on the right is what Autobahn has. And it's so nice. Instead of starting with talking about the closely related North American birds, they say flashing its trademark yellow-romped patch as it flies away, calling check for confirmation, this is one of the best-known warblers. That has some voice. That has some personality. You may even have a visual in your head, right, of the bird taking off. So that's what we're talking about when we say voice. So again, it's important to use voice consistently, right? You don't, depending on the page, it may change a little bit, but you want to be consistent with it. And both Google and people value that unique voice. The final one, organization. This is the big picture. This is less about the very specific details and more about how that content item fits into the larger schema. And so what we're talking about here is where it fits in the overall information architecture, making sure that it's findable. And so that means having good information architecture. Hopefully you're not doing like this bird is doing and kicking the turtle into the trash. Maybe it's easily found there. But purposefully organizing and placing things in a way, using that good, sensible navigation. And it even comes down to URL structures using really smart, readable URL structures. So a quick example from Audubon and what their navigation looks like. So when your content is smartly organized, now what we're talking about here is, okay, people can find what they're looking for hopefully, but can they even discover more because they can understand the structure that that content is part of? So here's a quick summary of what we went through. The six elements of content quality. And again, the reason why we're starting off with this is because this is gonna be the basis for how we assess that content. I should have mentioned earlier, but we are tweeting out the slide deck. It's on slide share so you can easily come back to this stuff. And then I also added a couple of resources. If you wanna read more or get some tips or checklists, there's a lot of great resources online already about this. And why do we do all of this? Well, Audubon has done an excellent job and you'll notice that when you do a Google search for yellow-rumped warbler, their results actually come up higher than Wikipedia, which is kind of hard to do sometimes. And the top two links at the top are from Cornell, who's pretty well known for their lab on ornithology. So that's gonna be hard to beat, but not bad for Audubon, number three. So again, the summary is quality is highly important. It's important for people and it's important for machines. And when you're in the dregs of a content audit, this is important to remember the purpose of why you're doing this work. And on the other side, while it is really important, it also has consequences. If you have low quality content, it could mean that you're not representing your brand well. It could mean that people can't even find your site or your product. It could have a lot of consequences that you should consider. All right, so how the heck do you assess it now? This is where we bring in our expert content strategist, Christina, she's gonna give you lots of good tips and tricks. Okay, so thank you, Courtney. I know a lot of the stuff probably seems pretty obvious. It's always nice to get that quick refresher, though, that the stuff has a huge impact on your website and your organization. So while we've looked at some of the ways that we're defining content quality and many others are defining content quality, hopefully we've convinced you of that fact or our argument. If you weren't convinced already, yeah, quality matters. So luckily there's an approach we've had a lot of luck with. It went varying degrees of complex websites. We've worked from 50 page websites all the way up to 15,000 page websites, and they're all hard. That's the long and short of it. So great, right, wonderful, how do we get there? Well, I'm kind of a downer in terms of comparing myself to Courtney. We gotta set some expectations before we even start venturing down this road. So let's have some real talk just for a second. What exactly are we getting ourselves into here? And be realistic, how many hours or weeks or months will we have to dedicate to this process? Will you have to travel this road alone? Is there anyone who can help you? Hopefully, are they able to dedicate the same amount of time you're able to dedicate? And how well do you know your site's content already? Are you planning on a migration soon or you just wanna fix what's there? Depending on these desired outcomes, this process can be just so wildly tedious and time-intensive, depending on your approach. And it might go without saying, but the larger, more complex the site, the more hair you're gonna pull out. I've been there. Just make sure before you even start thinking about it, just so you understand that it can take months upon months to just get the audit done, let alone actually fix the problems you find. Just bringing back horrible memories. I know. So along the way to, you're gonna, again, I'm super downer. You're gonna wanna give up. I promise you you're gonna wanna give up. So this jagged path, that's not perfect, but you see it spike in the middle? That's the part where everything seems just existentially pointless. And there's just like, why are we even doing this anymore? And you start crying and it's just really bad. A content strategist's colleague of mine's actually, she's giving a talk at CONFAB about how a content assessment process is very much like the five stages of grief. And she's done a very compelling job outlining that. And yeah, but push through it and it's gonna be worth it. Just know that it's coming. We're in this together. Okay, so enough of the scare talk. We've broken our framework, what we've found works into five, I say flexible steps, but you'll see why in a minute. Let's just jump in and take a look at step one, which doesn't really translate well to this presentation, so I'm sorry. It says take stock, see what you got. So you've considered and you've accepted the challenge, you're just resolute, you're doing this, you've anticipated your risks, you've chosen your allies, let's do this. So in order to assess content quality, we of course need to know what's there. This stage provides us a starting point for when we actually plan the audit. Keep in mind as we go forward to that a content inventory does not equal a content audit. Sometimes you'll see these used interchangeably, but these terms are very specific. A content audit is meant to look at quality, you're auditing something, whereas a content inventory is just a list of facts, it's what's there. It's giving you the page titles, the URLs, the metadata, it's not telling you anything about the quality of what's there. So inventory's a list, audit is the quality. Make sure I'm not moving backwards, there we go. Okay, so what we need to do first is generate the inventory, obviously. And when you know it, there's a bunch of ways to do this, which we'll get into in just a second, so bear with me. There are manual ways and there are automatic ways, and none of them are easy. So again, more on that in a second. Next in two, you're gonna wanna apply the method you decide on to generate your list of URLs. So this part can be just really, really stressful and completely overwhelming no matter what method you choose, but the end goal is the same. You want that list of pages, images, files, content types, in the case of Drupal, is helpful in some cases. All the things, so you can figure out what needs to stay, go, change, et cetera. But if your site is huge or not well structured, like I always seem to find, this flat list, especially if you're using an automatic method, is not gonna really give you much insight. So at this step, you just gotta take some time and sort through it, find the logic, or hopefully find the logic, figure out the organizational patterns, look for the easy spotted duplicates, or search URLs, or other kinds of just junk. I tend to look for URL naming conventions, remove obvious search and list pages, et cetera. And this looks different for everybody, and that particularly, again, applies to those automatic dumps. I'm gonna call them dumps. Finally, once your content is organized and you're satisfied that it's organized and cleaned up, just take a few steps back, just take a break, because it's gonna get so much worse from here, and let it sink in, so step back. I said I was done with the downer talk, I'm never done. Okay, so I promised to touch on this. Mention a moment ago, manual versus automatic inventories. So what do the manual inventory look like? It looks like me holding up in my office at my desk with my monitor that I wish looked better and was bigger in this office for six months. I think this six months, literally clicking through every single link on my website. Oh, not my website, but whatever website I'm working on. It looks like digging around those content types in Drupal, seeing if everything is well represented, and after every click I add that URL to my magic spreadsheet. It is the most mind-numbing task in the world, and that might be hyperbole, but in the moment it absolutely feels like it. It's pretty nuts. You become kind of one with your site though, and this is the value in a manual inventory. As painful as it is, you kind of become just completely intuitively connected to the content, and you understand it in a way you don't with an automatic inventory. So an automatic inventory is a URL crawl of some kind, done by a tool like Google Analytics, Moz SEO Screaming Frog is a decent one. I think there are some modules in Drupal, the site map module, if I'm not mistaken, I could be that can help with this process, but again, it sounds so great, but it leaves so much out, just without fail. I have never, ever, ever seen an automatic dump or an inventory or a crawl or whatever you want to call it. I've never seen an automatic generation of a list of URLs to be exhaustive enough. There are always holes, there are either way too many URLs or way too few. It just, it doesn't work out the way you want it to. I'm trying to think that the best case I've gotten recently is that we had a very big government client. Government, as you can probably expect, they're kind of well known, especially in websites, are kind of disorganized, they've got a lot of legacy content with not a lot of oversight looking backwards, but with good intentions, right? They're looking forward, they're trying to do better. So what I did, I was still thinking way beyond the, way over the moon. I'm like, I can do this so easily, just doing, running a dump from Google Analytics. Perfect, this is gonna make my life so easy. So I get this list of 129,000 URLs and I'm just like, oh no. And I'm working with her on the project. I'm like, Courtney, this is a bad, this is gonna be a problem. Until I go through that list and see it's just a ton of junk URLs, a ton of junk URLs. So after spending all of the time I saved on that automatic inventory, I spent all that time writing regular expressions and analytics to just get rid of all of the trash URLs that were there. Finally, it settled on a list of like 12,000 URLs, which was like, okay, this makes more sense. Much more manageable and probably more realistic. Until, you know, three weeks later into the project, I realized there's still a ton of stuff missing and I'm like, oh my God, we have missed so much of their content and they're gonna kill us. So I went through like five or six different automatic inventories before I settled on something that became a hybrid. So it was a manual inventory anyway. It was just a more tedious version of it. So there's a lot of value in running these kinds of things for just reference purposes, but when you start to rely on them, just be skeptical is what I guess what I have to say about that. So let's apply this again to another hypothetical website, right? We've got a bird thing going on and I'm really into birds. So let's roll with that. Our site here is for a university, a school within the university ecosystem. We're calling Kelly School for Bird Law. About 13,000 pages total because I've got experience with that. Two people running the website, 30 different kinds of folks in charge of creating content and honestly not governed by any reason at all. Earlier I asked that you be realistic. So here we kind of wanted to look at options at ends of a spectrum, right? You've got level of like low level of effort and you've got a higher level of effort. And both are okay, right? You don't have to assess everything, every bit of quality all at once and honestly, realistically, it might be impossible. So let's say our bird law team just has way too much else going on right now, can't handle this, but we're really dedicated to upping their content quality. So with limited resources, this could be something as simple as looking at the highest traffic pages or maybe the pages the school finds very valuable and listing only those, maybe 50 pages tops, not so unmanageable. And maybe it's honestly just the content types in Drupal. I mentioned that earlier, you've got maybe a list of 15 you look through and you're like, why are we saving this? We don't need any of this. I'm just nicks it all. That feels good and I've done it, so liberating. In the case, however, Ideal World, they've got unlimited resources and time. They decide at this point that they're gonna audit every single page they can find and they do it manually by clicking through. That's the highest level of effort. But like I said, there are ways to make an impact with fewer resources, so don't just feel completely bogged down if you can't do it all. Okay, so we're gonna give like pro tips at the ends of each one of these little steps. So this time I'm gonna belabor a point because that's what I like to do. Automatic inventories are a giant pain in the butt. They are really, really deceptive. There are a lot of tools out there that their marketing is all around saving you the effort and they just never, they're never as exhaustive as you want them to be. So you're gonna lose on your sanity for all the time you save by choosing that over a manual audit. Inventory, I did it, I'm guilty of it. I know, I do, it's awful. All right, so next up, we plan. It's time to figure out what to do with this list you've got. You work so hard on it. You've got your inventory, congratulations. You're gonna notice a trend going forward. Our framework here has a theme, it's a very obvious theme. Take an action, step back and plan. Take an action, step back and plan, take an action. So we very much pause and think between these stages. It's like a really boring dance that no one's ever gonna pay to see. And in the spirit of that dance, you must now choose yet again how much energy and resources you can really dedicate to the rest of this process. So at this stage, you and your team are literally planning what the audit will audit. This is a much less time-intensive stage, though. It's more about just thinking, about aligning processes and goals. It's now that you're going to choose what characteristics you'll audit, like I said. And basically your spreadsheet, it's what columns you're gonna be adding. Characteristics might include, relating back to what Courtney was talking about, might include H tags, broken links, presentation styles, mobile readability, alt text for images, consistency in voice, keyword density, et cetera. The sky is the limit, and your audit's gonna set that standard for the limit. So once you've chosen those elements, again, add them as columns. That's how that works, because now your inventory is magically becoming the audit. So after choosing and setting up the audit, make sure you very clearly define what it is you're actually aiming for. So for instance, if you plan to audit for voice, just make sure that you very clearly document what you mean by voice, especially if you've got more than just you on the team, because you don't want, you know, I've got Joe working on this with me, and Joe's got like, Lord only knows what voice in his head that's trying to tell him what the content should say, so you have to, if you're involving more than one person, everyone's gotta know what's going on. Next, set your scope. Maybe you're not planning on auditing everything at once, which is totally fine. Maybe you're shooting again for the top busiest pages. Maybe you're just focused on your homepage, or admissions page, whatever. Even if you've got this ginormous list of content, you don't have to touch it all right now, because it's probably not gonna, you might add to it, but you're probably not gonna change it too much if you're not auditing it. And then finally, and this one's a little bit tricky, because it could be its own talk, establish your baseline. Metrics are really hard, especially for content, and there's no kind of one-size-fits-all answer for what makes a single piece of content quality, because it's different for every organization in many ways, outside of structure, and presentation arguably has some stuff, but voice keywords, it's just different, and you can't just throw a blanket all over it. So once you've identified those metrics of success for your content, your site's content, just take a snapshot of what it is before you actually start any of this work, because you wanna know that what you're doing is working or not working, because if it's not working, you can adjust or find some way to adjust. Again, that's a whole nother talk. So again, these sub-steps in the mega-step number two of planning have options for level of effort. So we're back to the school of bird law, on one side of the spectrum for low level of effort. They don't have really the capacity to audit for 40 different elements of quality, especially for 13,000 pages. So instead, they decide, it's like, we're gonna audit for proper HTAG usage, because it's kinda easy to tell, like it's kinda easy to see, and it's limiting us to just like one thing, great. Maybe they choose broken links too, cool. We can just click through, we don't have to get anybody on the same page for that, just those are easy to tell. Parallel universe, ideal world, they're taking it all on, they're a lot more enthusiastic, have more freedom. Our bird law team of two meets and discusses all the things they noticed through this take stock stage. Sure seem like titles are missing a lot, voice was all over the place, there's a problem, styles were broken everywhere, all of it, you know, like we gotta fix all of this, they make a grand plan, they know it's gonna take time, but they are dedicated and committed and enthusiastic. Again, ideal world. But that's the, again, highest level of effort. Our pro tip here, when you're building out your audit, add a column for keep or toss. This is, we're not unique in this advice, this is pretty standard content audit stuff, you see it in every template that exists, but what we do recommend though is limiting that status to only keep and toss, especially if you're working with a larger team, because terms that you also see in these kinds of templates also like consolidate or edit or other things that are kind of, yeah, or left kind of vague and oftentimes used as a blanket of some kind, to just say, oh yeah, we need to do something with that, but we don't know what, and they put it aside and it just never gets touched. So the keep or toss can be really awesome because you can either say, I don't want this anymore, add some conditional logic maybe to your spreadsheet that turns it bright red, so you can see the gravity of all the stuff you're getting rid of, and then anything you're keeping, you can see if it needs to be edited based on your other columns. So that's just like an operational thing that I've found really helpful. And we are at step three, assess, out with the old. You are judging jury and you've got the power. This is what we've been waiting for, right? This is when you click through all your page, assuming, yeah, well, no, I guess, yeah, you're clicking through all the pages either way. There's no automatic way to do this. You're judging the content and you're marking in the audit what needs to be done. This is where you find and mark the problems. You're probably not fixing them yet. I wanna stress that. You might be, but hopefully not. That's a lot of work. You're just finding them. I'm gonna run through this because there's no secret sauce to this stage. You just do it and you adjust along the way, if necessary, if you find organizational structure problems, you're like, oh, this section's actually over here. Like this group of content's actually grouped in this way over here and I made a mistake when I set this up. Okay, great. Adjust as necessary, but just don't get too bogged down. You're gonna do a lot of scanning. You're probably gonna fight a lot with your team if you've got one. You click, you mark, you move on. And along the way, you're probably gonna start to spot some patterns, like some quality issue patterns. For instance, I guess you might make it through 20 pages of some section and realize this section sucks and we don't need it because it's completely irrelevant to everything we do. That's a great moment if it happens and it feels very good because that's, you know, geez, maybe 150 pages. The pattern you recognize extends to 150 pages and you can just nix all of it. It feels so good. Like spring cleaning. Again, we're keeping this very brief for a good reason. The stage looks different for everybody. It's like prescribing a specific way to edit something. Editors work in different ways. I mean, if you meet an editor and you meet another editor, they're gonna fight to the death about the right way to do things. And I understand, though, too, that it might feel like a cop-out that we're just saying, oh, this hard part, we're not gonna worry about that. You can figure that out. But I promise it's not a cop-out. It's just gonna take too long to get into all of these different ways of doing this. So instead, we're gonna include a few posts later on in a resources slide at the very end. Different from what Courtney mentioned, so you can go through these kind of posts about how other people have, step-by-step, done their own assessment. And maybe it can apply to you, maybe it won't. No magical advice again for Kelly's School of Bird Law. No shortcuts, level of effort here depends on everything you've set up so far. We just had to keep the structure the same because we're very, very, we like structure. Just get to it, bird law. Okay, pro tip here. Split up the work if you can. Caveat, it depends very heavily on, again, making sure your definitions are set straight and everybody is on the same page. I mean, not literally, but yeah, you know what I mean. With a little, if it's done right, it can be a huge help and can really speed up the process. Step four. You're coming up for air at this point. Let's just say all went well, you made it, that's the top of that hump before you go down just so you're going down just a little bit now and you're like, oh, God, it feels so good. Take a step back, look at everything and breathe. Reality check time, though. Depending on the level of effort, there's a good chance you can't fix everything. Not in a day anyway or not in any obvious set of time and that's okay, just be realistic about it. Some content might be very obviously higher priority than others, so now it's time to plan for that editorial execution. See, this is that unsexy tango thing I was talking about. It was a really boring dance. What's that? Oh yeah, like, would you say what? How dare you? Again, I want to stress, you made it this far, just take a second, pat yourself in the back because you're awesome. Self celebration is so important during this phase because of all the soul-sucking things that happen to you and you're amazing and good job, but then you gotta take a step, you gotta calm down. Don't be such a narcissist because once you're done patting yourself on the back, there's work to be done. Come on, free writing time. This is gonna sound so lame and I'm sorry. Courtney was like, why are you including this? But this has been super helpful for in my process. Just write down, just write some stuff. What have been your big takeaways during this process? What did you really just feel during this assessment thing and not like your personal, like I cried a lot, what did you discover? What's your intuition about all of your sites' content? What's that big picture that's emerging out of it? If you could sum up your website's content problems in a sentence, what would that sentence be? And this is where Courtney hates me. One of the extra, she doesn't hate me. I've found this very helpful. If your website's content had an online dating profile, what would its profile picture look like? I'll come back to that because again, we've had bizarre success with that. It may seem silly and I know it does, but the more you can apply metaphors to this really complex, ugly problem of content mess, the better handle you'll have on it and the better handle your team will have on it because you can conceptualize something that's completely unmanageable. And the more you can conceptualize it, the better plan, you can more concretely plan. I promise. So after your brain dump, you're gonna identify those most urgent issues. Identify any of your target deadlines that are looming if you have them. Identify your squeakiest stakeholders, you know the one like the pigeon stakeholders that fly in at the last minute and they poop on everything. Hey pigeon, birds, great. In other words, figure out what needs to be fixed first. Back to our bird law, back to the spectrum. So our team at the Kelly School has spent so much time on this endeavor already and they only have the time and resources to tackle a single issue. Let's say brain dumped and realized that their website's dating profile would be a greasy hoarder stuck in this crusty off brand recliner, like a den of hoarder den with newspapers everywhere and 20 dogs in his backyard. But he's so nice and he's got the perfect, he's a wonderful smile, he means so well. So they're not gonna be able to do an extreme makeover on it. They don't even know if he wants an extreme makeover, but maybe they can convince him to get a haircut. This means something, I promise. Practically, they're discovering, they're all their intro to bird law courses, really important content on their website. They're all missing proper H tags and the content's unreadable and it's poorly structured and it's just a real mess. And again, it's important. So they decide this is the priority course of action and they set their deadlines. The result of this audit, sorry, the rest of this audit is saved for later. They're not saying no to the rest of it, they're just putting it aside. So basically, they're giving their content just a quick haircut and they agree to come back to that audit in a few months. So in the alternate universe, where everything is perfect and everybody's got endless time and money, this bird law team prioritizes all the identified issues, like in order, details a plan of attack over the next six months or a year, whatever timeframe makes sense. And they even set up editorial workflows, deadlines, milestones. They even have check-ins with their stakeholders that are gonna care about this every week to answer every question that comes up during this process. Ideal universe, again, it's okay if you can't do that. Our pro tip. Involve as few people as possible. There's got to be, and I'll get to this towards the end again, like, because I like to belabor points, there must be that all-and-be-all-and-all content owner. There has to be. Hopefully it's you if you're in charge already. If another team needs to review something, meet only with one member of that team that also has say in that team, because the more people you involve, the harder it becomes and the more churn, the more cooks you have, the more fires you have. And it's just, it becomes a very slow-moving process. And I understand it's a political minefield, but as much as possible, involve as few people as possible. Finally, execute, right? This is the easiest part. And no reason not to now, right? You've already done all the work. So yeah, this is very exciting. You've got an action plan, you've got a way forward, you know exactly what's wrong, you know how to fix it. So, first and foremost, outline the tasks you're going to accomplish per day, per week, whatever timeline makes sense for you and your team, even if it's dedicating to just five pages a day. That works. And doubly important if you have a team working with you because teams often need deadlines. More on that too in a second. Make sure everyone knows what to do. Again, deadlines are your friend. Set them and keep them and annoy the hell out of people with them because they are the only thing keeping anything on track. Review and publish. Easy, right? That's the easiest part. All the hard work is done. And then finally, celebrate. It's over for now. Because it's never actually over. I'm gonna come back just for a second. So steps one and three in this execute phase could be their own talks once again. We make it, I'm making it sound very easy and let's just review it and publish it. This is fine. That's so easy. Editorial strategy for websites is incredibly hard and we understand that and don't mean to make light of it at all. But again, since there are too many details to go over included more resources in the end and hoped to actually give more talks on that in the future. But if you're looking for more, I've got a lot more so please feel free to reach out to me after. I like to share. Oops, that doesn't work. Once again, our structure fails us because the Kelly School for Bird Law can't really do anything at this stage. There's no level of effort. You've already determined it all. Do or do not, all that jazz. Good luck, Godspeed, Kelly School for Bird Law. You made it. My pro tip, I just can't stress it enough. If you do employ a team, all the deadlines just set them. It doesn't even matter if they're arbitrary. Just set them. Just give them like three days to do something and tell them if they don't, they're gonna get in trouble. Okay, so we've made it through the steps, right? It's amazing. You might be thinking, is she serious? Do you have any idea what my team and I have to deal with? I mean, I don't know your particular situation, but I do know that their entire conference is dedicated to sorting this stuff out and no one ever has, there's no one right way to do it. I know also that there are a lot of audit and inventory works a little bit easier, but audit templates out there that actually scare more people away than do any good because templates are really hard to implement for everybody's unique content needs. And I know there are always stakeholder problems. I'm very well aware of that and I know it's a political minefield. But I've also worked with a lot of different folks, a lot of different kinds of organizations, mostly government and nonprofits, which are famous again for disorganization and legacy content despite good intentions. But I've discovered the very best thing that you can fight for as a content evangelist, if you'll forgive that awful buzzword, is to just be a vocal proponent for editorial oversight. Don't say content strategy, don't say any of these terms that mean a million different things because as soon as you set the word editorial down, you're like, this is a process, quality matters, and there needs to be an editor in chief. Use the term SEO with folks who aren't convinced. SEO means something very different these days than it used to, but for a lot of folks, SEO is this magic sauce that makes your organization famous on the internet. And I don't mean to mean that in any sort of condescending way, it's just we've found in many conversations that SEO is ultimately what everybody's going for with our websites, everybody's boss is going for. So just stress the fact, there needs to be that editor in chief, that final owner, the final approver for quality's sake. So maybe even before, we've outlined some steps here that are time consuming and a huge commitment, so maybe even before that if you're into this and you're like, I wanna try this, I don't wanna dedicate myself to it yet, just think kinda quickly about your three most important pages or look at your analytics and see the highest traffic pages. Scan them over, are they structured with H tags, images of alt text, does it look okay? Is it readable? Too much jargon, relevant keywords, just look at all of this stuff that we've gone over and explore other content quality elements, which again, we're giving some more resources. Just look it over and scan it. Get a big picture, write some notes and consider how this might reflect a larger process in the future so you can have some realistic expectations. No need to jump in feet first without getting a feel for that temperature. So yeah, as far as we're concerned, quality matters, it has consequences, blah, blah, blah, we've said it a million times, so with that I'm gonna just fizzle out and say thank you very much and we've got some resources here like I'd mentioned and we'd love to take some questions. Do you have any suggestions on how to maintain quality? Yeah, and so there's not a good answer for that but there's a realistic answer. Like for instance, I run a magazine and one of the things we regularly do and we're a little bit more obviously an editorial place but every six months we go through our content and it's like 600 articles at this point because we've been operating for a while. We go through every single one as a team and check through to check for broken links and check for images that no longer work and make sure that information in that is still relevant because we're a UX magazine and trends change or best practices change and so just repeating it on a, depending on the site, maybe a huge site needs an audit every three years but make sure that when new content is added that there is that master list, that master inventory and you keep adding to it so you don't have to go and do guesswork again because that is how we get there in the first place. And I would add one more thing and that's once you establish what quality means and what quality elements you care most about that can become part of your editorial guide, right? So when you're producing new content ideally it should be meeting that criteria so it's sort of one less thing so you're not always adding to the pile. Still ideal, yeah, but yeah, that's a good point. Hi. Well, while you're doing this time consuming process how do you handle sites that are being edited and changed throughout the process? How do you deal with that? Well, so it depends on the size of the site I guess. In most cases and most of the sites no matter the size that we work with there are very few approvers of content. There are plenty of content producers but they've set up workflows with us. We've insisted that content producers cannot publish in most cases. They can submit and a content reviewer an editorial, an editor or whatever is dedicated to checking over that content and then approving that content. And so they've got people in place to monitor for that stuff as you go. That's the, I know that's not an ideal for everybody with fewer resources but that's the way we've seen it work very well when somebody is dedicated to hitting approve. Right, but what I mean is during your assessment if your content that you're looking over and your URLs are changing and the site is expanding during your process how do you deal with that? Can you expand on the URLs are changing? Well, like I work at a college and so much of what she said is so much like where I work. I understand. But I can't just freeze the site for three months or six months. There changes have to be made. Announcements have to be made, all this. So when you have your inventory in your list how do you account for the modification that took place from this threshold to this threshold? Yeah, and so in that case going and starting with the more static pages would be the best bet. So when you mentioned announcements and I'm sure that's not the only example announcements are those more, it's like blogs too, right? How do you audit a blog while you're still publishing content? Well, the answer is you don't. For those specific types of content the ones that you know are gonna be adding like people are going to be adding to constantly it makes sense to kind of separate those out into their own separate audit. So this is, we were talking about this earlier how there's many different kinds of audits and oftentimes nobody splits like nobody talks about them in different ways. And so there's like migration audits. In your case these very dynamic audits. So in that case for content that's constantly being added to just setting the date like this is where we stopped. That's this is where we started the audit and any content after this needs to be approached later. And then ideally you can get that team involved and saying hey we need a lot of you involved we need a content freeze and we need to look over this stuff quickly. And obviously you're not gonna get through six years of announcements but you can look at the announcements of the past six months because announcements from six years ago probably nobody's gonna be looking at anyway. But I totally feel for you that there is an entire, I mentioned an entire conference dedicated to this. There is a content strategy conference called CONFAB. They split off into a whole different conference for CONFAB higher education because it's such a challenge. So you're not in that alone. Okay, thank you. Well thank you. We have other questions we'd love to chat and we've done a lot of this but we're always looking to learn more. So if you've had success or have any tips that we didn't include we'd definitely love to hear them. And again the viewer identity is where and Anne on Circlish is where you can find the slide deck we tweeted. That's right. Thanks guys, thanks. A minute, not gonna touch it. I'm gonna share it with you. Oh. Like there were two such...