Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Is Your Web Site Content Sustainable? Kill as Much (or more) Content as You Create

How many pages are there on your site that NO ONE has visited in the last year? If you have a large site I’ll bet there a lot. Maybe 10% or more?

Someone in marketing decided that you just HAD to have a page about whatever so it got built, and it gets updated. And nobody is reading it.

Here’s an interesting article from Gerry McGovern about the True Cost of Content.
An organization that had a 4,000 page public website decided to do a major audit of content quality. As a result, it got rid of 1,000 pages. It didn’t get one single enquiry for the deleted pages. A 100,000 page intranet deleted 60,000 pages. There was not one single enquiry for the deleted pages.

Whenever we do a Web content project we build a content matrix to guide the way. An important part of all my projects is a tab on the Spreadsheet titled “Clean Up?”. As I’m working my way through content that might be affected by the project, I keep a list of pages that a suspiciously lame that I think could afford to get the axe. When I have a few extra minutes I’ll run a Web Trends report and see if I can justify taking them down.