How do you absolutely ensure you've got EVERYTHING in a content inventory?

Question

I've seen suggestions of various tools that crawl sites and generate reports. I've seen people suggest combing server logs, or just simply going through a website page-by-page and link-by-link (although this quickly becomes untenable for larger architectures -- i.e. thousands of pages). But is there any accepted best-practice for making sure you didn't miss anything?

Or is the answer: You can't?

Answer 1

The solution depends on the organization and how it creates and manages its content.

Ultimately, there are a few ingredients needed in order to track and manage content responsibly:

1. All content should be stored in some kind of data format, preferably a database. This allows you to run quick / easy analytics on all content at once.
2. Content creation should be a process, such as following a draft > review > publish workflow. This enables you to dictate and control what content becomes public.
3. Content should have change history and authors. This will enable you to track who made what changes and when.