Content Evaluation

Overview

Over time, websites grow organically and can become outdated, unwieldy, or no longer serve your audience effectively. To combat this, regular review of your website content, including all public-facing electronic documents, is critical. 

• Note: “Electronic document” refers to any file linked to your website that is not an HTML file. This includes PDFs, Word documents, spreadsheets, PowerPoint documents, and images.

A “content evaluation” is sometimes called a “ROT analysis.” Both involve identifying content that is 

• Redundant: Duplicate or repeated content or data
• Obsolete: Content or data that is longer accurate or useful to end users
• Trivial: Information that is not valuable or necessary to store forever

We recommend that you conduct a content evaluation of your website and electronic documents every year. 

To help you do that, we’ve broken down the steps for you in this How-to guide!

Purpose of a Content Evaluation

The goal of a content evaluation is to ensure that website pages and electronic documents are accurate, relevant, and accessible.

• Accurate: The page or document accurately reflects current policy, process, or procedure
• Relevant: The page or document is relevant today, or it is historically relevant for legal or compliance reasons
• Accessible: The page or document meets State of Maryland Accessibility Policy and Accessibility Guidelines

Value of a Content Evaluation

Removing outdated, redundant, and low-value content

• Improves the customer experience by keeping only the best content that addresses your audience’s needs
• Improves website usability by making it easier for users to quickly find what they are looking for
• Reduces short- and long-term costs by reducing the number of pages and documents that must be maintained

How to Conduct a Content Evaluation

During a content evaluation, your goal is to identify the best content to keep. Especially for large websites, this can feel like an overwhelming task. What does “best content” mean? How much content should I keep? How much content should I remove?

To give you a sense of the keep vs remove scale, take a look at these statistics from content evaluations conducted in government and industry:

• Most thorough content evaluations keep only 40-60% of the original content.
• A content evaluation laser focused on user/audience needs may keep as little as 20% of the original content.

To help you evaluate your content, we’ve broken down the steps for you in this How-to guide!