This hurts! There is no other way to describe your first job as an IA. Mind-numbing and boring but very necessary to establish a starting point for a site redesign. It may take a week to do but the information you gain from the excersise is rich and from it you can make informed decisions about the direction your site will go in.
After doing two I realised how important these are to any refresh or redesign. Structural problems are obvious and the hidden gems in your site are revealed. With the aid of web analytics you can see the most popular areas. With search logs you can see how a user finds your information. This can also be the basis for your controlled vocabularies once your taxonomy has been created. Use social bookmarking sites to note the tags your user’s are compiling and that you are reflecting the language they are speaking.
Whatever you think about the hard slog of doing a content inventory – stick with it. It probably will be the best research time you spend in getting your site the redesign it deserves.
