From manual content inventories to dynamic content insights with David Hobbs

We’re doing it wrong

Manual content inventories are time-consuming necessity of content projects; especially large ones or when doing complex content migrations.

Or are they?

In this video podcast, we take a look at automating content inventory work, specifically, how to visualise content at scale and speed, to turn the inventory process into an opportunity for discovery and insight into content that can inform your content strategy. David Hobbs, author of “Website Migration Handbook v2” and “Website Product Management” talks us through some techniques and ideas, and we get a look at a new class of tool: content inventory visualisation.

This session does show a new tool, but this is not a sales pitch or endorsement and is not sponsored content. What we’re discussing today is what the drivers were for the creation of this tool category and how to rethink how you approach your content inventory work. The typical inventory – a huge table of links – is not scalable, so how could we approach this challenge in another way?

In this podcast, we discuss: 

• What’s wrong with the way we usually do content inventories today?
• How to go beyond tools like Screaming Frog and Excel to something that allows you to drive content strategy decisions
• How current methods encourage silos in the content and business which don’t encourage customer-centric strategy, and
• How to balance holistic, big-picture views with deep-dive into individual content items.

About David Hobbs

David Hobbs helps organizations make big digital changes. David’s advice is based on experience from within organizations, as a CTO of a web development company, and as a consultant. David is the author of “Website Migration Handbook v2” and “Website Product Management”.