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			<h2><span>1.1</span> Background</h2>
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				<figcaption>Figure 1-1: The Ten4 Design office (Ten4 Design, 2011).</figcaption>
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			<p>The original ideas for this project came from my time working at <a href="http://ten4design.co.uk">Ten4 Design</a>.</p>
			<p>Ten4 Design (or Ten4 for short) is a small digital design and development agency based in Shoreditch, London. They specialise in helping their clients to create effective websites and digital campaigns through a wide range of services including project management, strategy, UX design, visual design, front-end development and Content Management System (CMS) integration. They also offer a variety of post-sales services including the 'site health check'; a carefully researched report on an existing site which brings together analytical data and expert advice to suggest potential improvements to content, structure and design.</p>
			<p>For Ten4 a big part of creating an effective and engaging website is the very first stage of the process, strategy. This is where the focus is on looking objectively at the content available to users and how it should be updated to be more useful to the website visitors. It's also an area where there are a lot of manual data-driven processes compared to other areas of the workflow which are much more streamlined. Tasks such as putting data into reports, compiling statistics and analysing webpages are all done in a laborious, drawn-out way.</p>
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			<h2><span>1.2</span> Initial ideas</h2>
			<p>The project began with a few simple ideas focused around the idea of simplifying web strategy processes and streamlining the workflow gaps identified above. Content strategy emerged as a more specific area to focus on because of the increasing prevalence of content-based services provided by Ten4 and two main ideas came to light. For each of the ideas preliminary research was carried out to assess their feasibility and relevance to industry professionals.</p>

			<h3>Content gathering software</h3>
			<p>The first idea was a web application to help digital agencies collect and organise new content from their clients in a simpler, easier way. Currently, web design companies like Ten4 struggle to get meaningful and appropriate web content from clients in a timely manner and they end up chasing down content through emails. Once the content is sent over crude spreadsheets are used to try and sort text, images, links and video sent by the client into a form that can be entered into a CMS as part of a process called content population.</p>
			<p>From the start the idea seemed quite vague and while the concept of automating the laborious organisation of client content got good feedback from the UX designers at Ten4 Design it was difficult to pin down a structure and shape of an application. The main problem was that no application could work out-of-the-box with so many different sources and types of content and therefore would have little advantage over the spreadsheet based system that is currently used. While researching potential competing products I found a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) product called <a href="http://www.gathercontent.com/">GatherContent</a> which aims to tackle the same problem.</p>
			<p>Despite not moving ahead with the idea the preliminary research carried out led to a closer examination of the emerging field of content auditing and deeper thoughts about the sort of tools would actually help content creators, user experience designers and developers to make their web content more effective and ultimately, more profitable for everyone.</p>

			<h3>Content auditing tool</h3>
			<p>The next significant idea was a tool that would allow web design agencies to more efficiently carry out the very first part of the content strategy process; analysing existing content structure and effectiveness. This process is known as content auditing or creating a content inventory.</p>
			<p>The information obtained from a content audit performed prior to a site redesign is invaluable when making decisions about the new site's user experience. It can also be used to back up proposed ideas to a client by providing them with qualitative data that can be analysed easily. In addition to this the data can also be used to support the improvement of existing content on an client's site by providing them with notes about the quality of text, images and video on each page.</p>
			<p>Currently content auditing is carried out in a very broad way by browsing through the website's pages, looking up statistical information on Google Analytics and then recording notes about the page's content using a spreadsheet based system. This manual method of carrying out content audits means that it's very time-intensive and as such, is often only performed for larger projects where a research budget is available. If the process could be made quicker and simpler then it could be used on smaller projects to great effect.</p>
			<p>The proposed application would eliminate much of the manual processing by crawling a site using automated spidering that works in a similar way to a search engine. Once the pages are retrieved additional information and notes could be added manually alongside statistics from analytical data sources like Google Analytics. The list of pages could then be used in a number of ways including the generation of a report to be presented to the client directly or attached to an existing proposal.</p>
			<p>While there are several products on the market which fulfil various parts of the audit process the initial research revealed no single product which can pull the process together by using automated crawling, the API's of other statistical information tools and qualitative evaluation of the content.</p>
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			<h2><span>1.3</span> Aim and objectives</h2>
			<p>Once the idea was selected the following aim and objectives were written to steer the project in an appropriate direction:</p>

			<h3>Project aim</h3>
			<p>To create a web application that helps web agency staff to audit the content and structure of an existing website and analyse the effectiveness of the content.</p>

			<h3>Product objectives</h3>
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				<li>Design a user interface that makes it simple to gather data about a website</li>
				<li>Create a web app which allows users to carry out content audits quickly</li>
				<li>Allow the user to export useful information and statistics from the app</li>
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		<a class="next-part" href="<!-- @path literature-review.html -->">Chapter 2: Literature Review</a>
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