Content inventory

What a content inventory is

A content inventory is a complete list of everything you have published, with the same facts recorded about every item: what it is called, where it lives, what format it is in, when it was last edited and who owns it now. It is a register. It is not a verdict.

That distinction is the whole of it. An inventory never says whether a page is any good, whether it earns anything, or whether it should go. The version with the opinions in it is the content audit, which is built on top of an inventory and costs more, because judging takes longer than counting.

When you need one

Three situations make the plain list worth buying on its own. You are about to rebuild or move the website, and somebody has to know what is currently on it before any decision can be made. You have inherited the content from whoever had the job before you, and nobody can say what exists or who wrote it. Or several people publish in several places, and the material has stopped being findable even inside the business.

You do not need an inventory as a separate purchase if what you actually want is to be told what to do about the content. Buy the audit in that case. The inventory is its first deliverable, and paying for both means paying twice for the same spreadsheet.

What goes in it

One row per item, and an item is anything a customer could read. Website pages, blog posts, downloadable guides, sales sheets, the newsletter archive, video descriptions, and whatever sits in a shared drive that staff still attach to emails.

• Where it is. The web address, or the folder and file name for anything that is not on the site.
• What it is. Format and type: service page, article, PDF, landing page, email, listing.
• Dates. When it was first published and when it was last edited, wherever the system still records that.
• Who owns it. The person responsible for it now, which is rarely the person who wrote it four years ago.
• How it connects. What on your own site links to it, and whether any menu points at it at all.

None of those columns holds an opinion. Two people running the same inventory on the same business should come back with the same rows.

What you get

The spreadsheet. One row per item, the columns above, sorted and filtered however you like. It is yours, it is plain, and every later decision about the site gets made against it.

The shape summary. One page. How many items of each type, where they live, how much of your material sits outside the website altogether, and which sections are thickest and thinnest. Counting, not grading.

The loose ends. A short list of what could not be resolved: items with no owner, the same document living at two addresses, files nobody could open, pages the site publishes that nothing links to. These are findings of fact rather than recommendations, and they are usually the part people read first.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. A Winnipeg equipment supplier is fairly sure it has “about sixty pages”. The inventory comes back with 214 items: 38 website pages, 96 blog posts, 41 PDFs on a shared drive that sales staff still email out, 22 product sheets that exist in two places with different prices on them, and 17 pages the website publishes that no menu or link points at. Four people are listed as owners and two of them left the company.

Nothing in that list is called good or bad. But the supplier now knows the rebuild is a 214-item job rather than a sixty-page one, that the price on 22 sheets has to be settled before anything else happens, and that two departed owners' worth of material needs a new owner this week. The list did all of that without offering a single opinion.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Where you publish, who publishes, and what lives outside the website. No charge.
2. Access. Read-only access to the site's admin, or a crawl of the public site, plus a look at the shared drive and any archive you want covered.
3. The work. Two to four working days for a business with under 200 items. More than that, or material scattered across several systems, is quoted after the call.
4. Delivery. The spreadsheet, the shape summary and the loose ends arrive together, with a short call afterwards if you want me to walk the columns.

What it costs

An inventory is quoted after the first call, because the cost turns on how many places you publish rather than how many pages you have. It is the cheapest piece of work in this group and the number is fixed in writing before anything starts. The pricing page shows the four ways of working, including the content audit at $450 CAD; since that audit contains an inventory, buying the inventory alone only makes sense when you genuinely do not want the judgement yet.

What happens next

Most people do one of three things with the list. They put it straight into a migration plan, because a rebuild was the reason for asking. They come back for the audit, now that the size of the job is known. Or they hand it to me to turn into a content library so staff can find things without asking. None of that is assumed, and the inventory is a complete piece of work on its own.