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I'm planning a restructuring of a small business website. Currently I'm outlining it using OpenOffice.org Writer.

The more I include, the harder it becomes to catch overlaps and try to find ways to restructure the site or content to avoid them. What strategies, tools, and free / opensource software is out there for this?

I'm sure in the end some overlap will occur. In fact some needs to occur. But there should be ways to minimize this.

To be clear, I'm talking about the actual content, not the code.

I edited the question title to include book, because this is really about content management in general on any medium to large scale project (its pretty easy to keep track of replicate information on single page ads).

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  • How small is this site? Maybe someone else can but I cannot think of any software which will keep track of content duplication for you. What if you use two different image adds which are different but re-iterate some bullet points or whatever; I cannot imagine that software is going to know about this. I don't know if the client simply pulls wishes from their bums but this goal sounds very unattainable and nothing is going to replace human proof-reading for this situation. I would charge a monthly maintenance fee to keep replicate content out of their site because apparently it's difficult – MonkeyZeus Aug 19 '14 at 18:23
  • @MonkeyZeus I don't know why you're making so many assumptions or what client you're referring to. Your entire comment is also a little demeaning (and useless). – Ryan Aug 19 '14 at 18:35
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If you are creating your site using WordPress, then the use of categories and/or tags may be of some help as it will allow you to filter your previous published posts via the category/tag. You would then be able to see that you have 5 post on one specific topic. This would not prevent you from writing a duplicate article, but it would allow you to check the content within your categories/tags in order to verify that you aren't duplicating content prior to publishing new content.

WordPress Categories vs Tags: http://en.support.wordpress.com/posts/categories-vs-tags/

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You get this kind of problem particularly with intranets.

Basically someone has to 'own' the system and monitor it and have some power to crack down on duplication.

The main issue you are up against is that users are very happy to add information, but then they never bother to come back and remove out of date info.

The fancy name for this is 'Knowledge Management' so you might find this a useful search term for other resources.

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  • Thanks for trying to help but this really doesn't answer the question. The website I'm working on has no user-generated content. Its all me. So other than pointing me towards the term Knowledge Management to search for which could have been left as a comment, I don't see how this answer provides strategies, tools or software to help me plan the content to minimize replicating information. – Ryan Aug 19 '14 at 16:50
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    Sorry, I didn't get that content control is all down to you. If its all down to you and you get those situations where an item of information could equally go in either cluster A or cluster B - really you want to put it where your users are most likely to look for it. And sometimes you just end up cross referencing between two places on the site if they are both similarly logically likely. Doing Card Sorting with users will find out which 'heading' they are most likely to file an item under. – PhillipW Aug 19 '14 at 17:00
  • Sorry since you didn't tag me in the comment I completely missed it, just happened to be reviewing my Qs on UX and saw this was still open. If you want to edit the comment into your Answer I'll mark it correct. – Ryan Oct 14 '14 at 13:33

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