Whether you have a new website or old, taking inventory of all of your content is an important step for ensuring easy navigation. Something I have repeated many times to clients, your website is a reflection of your planning. The clarity of the reflection largely depends on how you organize your content. Poor organization, often equals poor reflection.

Great for Navigation

If you are starting a new website, creating groups or categories to sort all of the content on your website is a must. It makes navigation easy for visitors, and will make for future website improvements easier to manage.

Equally, for those of you working on sites that have been around for a while, taking that inventory is just as important. Time is a killer for websites. New content is constantly being added, changes in home page format, and changes in priorities all influence how our site are organized. It’s up to you* to keep that content as organized as possible.

Where Did it Go?

Keeping your content nice and organized is a good idea for your users, but the main reason I was energized to write this was for the case of the “Where did it go?” issues.

This is the TV room, but where did remote go?

The where did it go issue is a common scenario where killer content has been linked to from a home page on a website. The content is easy to find, visitors like it, they dig around your site some more, and what page do they bookmark? They bookmark the home page.

Then two weeks down the road they go back to your website looking for that killer content they found and bookmarked, only to find you moved it. Now where is it? This is where your inventory and categorizing skills are reflected. A well organized site will help visitors find that content again, where a poorly organized site could be a visitor gone.

* I say “you” in the content, but this could be the perfect time to do a little user testing. Getting input from a few others on how content should be grouped can make that navigation even better.

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