Field Types

Basic

Basic fields are fundamental to content analysis. For instance, URL and Title are virtually always in an analysis, and for traditional inventories and audits form the backbone for every row in the spreadsheet (each row has a unique URL).

Fields: File Format, File Group, Title, URL, Unique Content ID

Brand

Your brand captures what is unique about your organization and how it projects that uniqueness (or your organization may have multiple brands). Fields to capture brand can be fairly mechanical (such as what page template is used, which may project the brand in some blunt ways such as your logo) or very much not mechanical (like voice and tone).

Fields: Tone, Voice

Category

Categorization is essential for content analysis. Some of the uses include:

• Seeing the pervasiveness of something, such as average reading level by site section. If we have two categories, then we can slice two ways (such as reading levels by content type and site section).
• Categories are often useful for making decisions about content (such as deciding to delete all blog posts on a site that are over some age)
• Sometimes categories are one of the main things we are anayzing, for instance to understand on a currently-unstructured site the pervasiveness of certain metadata values by content type

Fields: Content Type, Folder1, [IA] Depth, Site, Site Section, Site Type, Source System, Topic

Decision

Most content analysis is toward the goal of making some sort of content transformation. In particular, there are fields you may add that are for that decision you make about what to do with the content.

Fields: Bucket, Disposition, Effort, Resourcing, [Target] Field

Org

Although many websites are far too organizationally focused (rather than focused on the site visitor), sometimes fields to capture organizational dimensions are helpful in a content analysis, partly because this may capture who needs to act on changes. Revenue-based fields can also very concretely help prioritize efforts.

Fields: Author, [Category] Revenue, Division

Quality

Quality indicators can either be the entire point of an analysis (when testing a hypothesis or understanding the pervasiveness of a problem) or they can be used to inform action (for instance, if a page has a lot of different quality issues then perhaps it should just be rewritten).

Fields: Date Published, Has [Problem], Near Text Duplicate, [Problem] Count, [Problem] Example, Redundant

Technical

Technical fields can be essential to an analysis, and they have the advantage of usually being relatively easy to gather. That said, we shouldn't use that as an excuse to impress each other with huge inventories with lots of technical fields that don't provide much value to our actual goals. Some technical fields can prove very useful (like the count of pages in each PDF).

Fields: Crawl Depth, MIME Type, Meta Description, Meta Keywords, PDF Page Count

User

Ultimately we want to make it easy for users to complete certain tasks. Sometimes we can directly capture this type of metric, but usually we need to confine ourselves to metrics that are more removed from the actual user experience.

Fields: Audience, Page Views, Reading Level, [Success Event] Count