Yes, I did back-date this post, but only because I was somehow criminally negligent in not writing it in August. (Oh, yeah: I was working 12 hours a day on a client project in August.)
I used Jackie D’Elia‘s Genesis Communities CPT plugin before I had ever talked to her, and got to know her in part through the Genesis Slack community and partly because were have both been regular panelists for WP-Tonic Live since the middle of this year. I was delighted when she announced her new podcast, Rethink.fm, and had a great time as the guest for Episode 2: Content Audits Save Development Time.
I started to become a big proponent of content strategy after seeing a presentation by Stephanie Leary at WordCamp SF 2013 and reading her book, Content Strategy for WordPress, and was further encouraged by a presentation that Lisa LaMagna gave for the East Bay WordPress Meetup in February 2015.
In my conversation with Jackie I talk about how important it is to do a content audit when you are (re)designing a site for a client that already has a lot of existing content. This is not just so you’ll know whether the content is current, relevant, and on-message, but in order to know what kind of content the client actually has. For one large project in 2016, I reviewed more than 600 blog posts and discovered that a large proportion of them weren’t blog posts at all: they were press releases, event announcements, presentation and webinar slides, or news coverage.
Even before the content audit, I guessed that this client would need an online newsroom and some kind of event management tool, but without it I would never have understood the complete scope of the project or been in a good position to export the content from the old site and import it into the new site–with all those redirects for the items that would no longer be in the blog.
In fact, I would advise conducting a content audit, or asking the client to do so, before creating a proposal for a site build, the better to avoid unpleasant surprises for either you or the client.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PluwENNaEHQ
I’d encourage you to subscribe to Jackie’s podcast–there’s some great stuff there.
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