Content Analysis
Content is the reason your audience comes to your site. Add to this the fact that you have chosen a content management system to develop your site and you have two pretty big factors encouraging you to understand your content needs fully.
Making Content Decisions
In order to get your content into your desired site structure, you need to make some decisions. The table below provides a brief introduction to the various content related analyses discussed in the pages that follow. Each decision in the table below can affect content decisions you need to make later.
| Analysis | Decisions |
|---|---|
| Type of Content | Identify all the types of content your site needs Ultimately determine the best strategy for distinguishing between one type of content and another |
| Content Purpose | Identify the purpose of the content |
| User-content Relationships | Determine if/how the content and/or its data relates to your audience |
| Content Data | Identify what data makes up each type of content |
| Content Sources | Identify where your content or data will come from |
| Data Reuse | Determine how content data will be used outside the node to which it was originally assigned |
| Content Categories | Determine if your content should be categorized Decide if you want your categories to be links Decide if you want pre-defined terms or user generated terms |
| Content Relationships | Determine how those types of content relate to each other |
| Category Terms | Identify which terms you need for each category |
| Content Meta Data | Determine if the data needs meta data |
| Content Language | Determine if your site needs to accommodate multiple languages |
| Content Access | Determine if you want to control who can view, create, edit, and delete your content |
When you get to the design phase, you will visit content again by considering how it is organized in the site, how it is arranged in the site interface, and how it is configured, to name a few. But all that needs to wait because the decisions you make at this time will affect your design decisions later.
Conclusion
If you and/or your staff are planning and building your site, you might be tempted at this time to start imagining your site with the content in it; this is only natural. Use a design discussion to help get your thoughts rolling if you want but remember to come back to the content analyses.
Please be aware that if you press forward into design too quickly, you might miss something in the other analyses that could impact how your site works. If you are hiring someone to design your site, they will need your content requirements. The more detail you provide in your requirements, the more likely you are to get a design that meets your needs and your vision.