What is your go-to approach for content mapping?

Question

What is your way to content map a website? My current redesign project has a span of 60+ governmentwebsites. I don't have the time to do a in depth research of each website/application, but I need a clear overview of all the content available.

The goal is as followed:

1. Map most the content on the websites (content, level in the website, category);
2. Sort all of the content, look for overlap (merge websites in the end);
3. Use card sorting to establish a good flow;
4. Reduce the ammount of portals, websites and applications.

What is your advice?

• Should I start with a mind map to structure it right away? This would take more time ofcourse.
• Just map everything in Excell? How?
• ....

Any experience on this topic is much appreciated.

Edit:

I allready started with using Excell and ordening everything per level. This allows some overview. Content categories is the next step.

Answer 1

A project of this huge scope must begin with a Content Inventory and Audit.

Then, go straight to your users and do an open card sort test. I hope you have a good budget because you will need a lot of users for something this big.

After the results of the card sort comes in, put together the new information architecture of the system and validate it using a tree test. Again, with a lot of users!