Content strategy for Roundarch Isobar (digital agency)

Business challenge
As part of a full redesign of a pharmaceutical company Web site, Roundarch Isobar needed a content strategist to do a detailed inventory of the existing site’s marketing content and corporate information (several hundred Web pages and hundreds of pdfs), plus an online catalog of about 700 products.

What I did
Working with another content strategist, I first facilitated final discovery and scoping for the inventory spreadsheet design and participated in early wireframe reviews to help identify new content requirements.

Our inventory of the marketing and corporate sections was a straightforward page-by-page documentation of locations (URLs), content types, formats, etc. The catalog inventory required restructuring exported data for usability, then analysis to identify discrepancies between the data and the draft information architecture (IA). I looked for:

  • Product types or subtypes in the database that were missing from the draft IA;
  • Additional database metadata now required by the draft IA;
  • Instances where the database taxonomy (hierarchical structure) differed from the IA hierarchy.
  • Discrepancies between database category names and IA page titles.

Once the inventory was complete I prepared a presentation the agency’s creative team used to introduce and explain our work to the client.

Impact
Overall, the inventory gave the client a valuable, detailed view of their current Web content, a handy tool they could use to assess its quality and quantity. I surfaced several discrepancies between the content in the product database and the new, in-progress design which if left undiscovered would have increased the client’s project cost.