Description
Your next major assignment will be an external, solicited proposal to a business or organization
of your choice to overhaul their website so that it more clearly aligns with their values and
stands out in their slice of industry. More details on the assignment in the next activity this week.
The first step in this process is to choose a company or organization you would like to make this
proposal to (we’re pretending here) and perform a content audit on their existing website.
Whichever company or organization you choose is entirely up to you and they may or may not
already have a website that is working well. Don’t worry about that for the moment. The learning
goal for this activity is to essentially catalog your chosen company or organization’s website and
become familiar with their online presence and what they are like.
Business Website Content Audit: One to one and a half pages minimum, single-spaced, in
some sort of organized format, i.e. full sentences, appropriately organized paragraphs, heading
if necessary. A website content audit is usually something that companies hire outside
consultants or freelancers to complete for them. It can have many components; it can include
analysis, comparison, and/or outside research, among other things. At the very least, and in the
simplest terms, a content audit is an inventory of the contents of a website. For the purposes of
our class and this activity, your website content audit will only be an inventory of the site you’ve
chosen.
Once you choose a company or organization, visit their website and begin to list or catalog
what’s on their site and what it looks like. If they have a site map, that will help you immensely.
Your inventory needs to be comprehensive and should include things like what pages are on the
site; what’s on those pages, i.e. written content including font and size, video, photos, external
links, etc.; what colors are on the website and where do they appear; and how frequently each
of these elements appear on the site. The more descriptive you are at this stage, the happier
you will be as you draft your proposal this week.
After compiling this inventory, organize everything you’ve found into a document in some way
that makes sense to you. You can order things page by page, or by similar content, or by
frequency, or whatever way is organic for you. You may use lists or tables if it helps you, but I
am expecting you to have full sentences and paragraphs as well. While your audience for this
assignment is primarily you, I will be looking to see that you understand what this assignment
asks of you so that I can redirect as needed.
