8. Content
OKAY! CONTENT! This is going to be an easy, breezy chapter, because as we’ve been saying all along, content isn’t really that hard to do!
Heh. Just jokin’. But it will be a fun chapter, because now we’re going to explain how to define the content components of the content strategy quad. We’ll walk you through the decisions you’ll need to make, including:
• Substance: What content do you need and why?
• Structure: How will your content be prioritized, organized, formatted, and displayed?
As you read through this (gigantic) chapter, please remember: When you make a choice about one component of the quad (like substance, for example), it very likely has impact on all three other components. Connecting the content components and people components is one of the most important roles that content strategy plays in your organization.
Substance
Pop quiz: What should your content do? Okay, time’s up. Answer: Your content must help you achieve your project objectives, your business goals, your user goals, and your long-term strategy. (Did you get it right? Great! Give yourself a pat on the back. Which is actually harder to do than one might think. Anyhow.)
In the past, you may have made decisions about your content by compiling colleague wish lists, polling your users, taking into consideration what content you already have online, and so on. These efforts resulted in a content list, which resulted in a site map, and so on. Although this may have been partially effective, you likely also ended up with a lot of stuff you didn’t really need, after all.
Identifying what content you need is actually a pretty complicated process. There are lots of factors to consider, including:
• Audience
• Messaging
• Topics
• Purpose
• Voice and tone
• Sources
Let’s take a look at each of these individually.
Audience: Who are you Trying to Reach?
During analysis, you asked your stakeholders to identify and prioritize their target audiences. Go get that list now. We’ll wait.
Obviously, stakeholders have different areas of focus. As a result, you probably have a list of several “equally high-priority audiences.” For example, Paul from PR wants to target the media; Juan from marketing wants to prioritize prospective customers; Mary in HR wants to reach job seekers, and so on.
While it’s possible to create content that appeals to all of these audiences, it doesn’t serve any of the users particularly well. Your content will be much more effective and easy to manage if you set some parameters and priorities about who your content is for.
Users: Get specific
Start by defining your user groups in detail. For example, if you say “customers,” what do you actually mean? Do you mean prospective customers or existing customers? Do you mean customers for product line A or product line B? Do you mean soccer moms, punk rock fans, or soccer moms who are also punk rock fans?
Most importantly, define why punk-loving soccer moms are important to your organization and its goals. Why do you want to create content for them? What do you want them to do with your content?
Some organizations like to develop personas—fictional characters or archetypes that represent the user types. When done effectively, personas can help you define your users’ characteristics clearly. But elaborate personas (for example, Margaret, 38, is a radiologist from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who likes rabbits and Neil Diamond ...) aren’t necessary. In fact, they can get a little distracting. A bulleted list of basic user attributes can work just as well.
When you have a clear definition of your target users, you have a better chance for creating content they’ll actually use. You’ll also make sure that everyone in your organization is talking about the same thing when they talk about a specific user group. There are lots of other benefits, too, but those two alone are worth the time and effort.
Priorities: Rank and file
Now comes the hard part: prioritizing your user groups for each content channel or web property you have (or want to have). Make a numbered list, starting with your first priority user as number 1. Then, continue down the list with the second priority, third, et cetera. It may be tempting to give two audiences the same ranking, but don’t. No ties. Because of your stakeholders’ multiple “top audiences,” there will almost certainly be negotiation involved. Be prepared.
Additionally, ranking your users can identify gaps. For example, if you establish that “existing employees” are not a priority target audience for the public website—but they still need content for one reason or another—maybe an extranet or intranet is a good idea. Or, if you want to start a Twitter feed, but realize you don’t know who it’s really for, maybe you need to give the whole Twitter thing a little more thought.
Identifying and prioritizing your target users are the first steps in creating content that works for your users and your business. Not to mention, you’ll avoid the countless, constant headaches that come with trying to be all things to all people. Bonus.
Messaging: What You Want Your Users to Remember
As we explained in Chapter 6, Analysis, we define messages as bits of information (thoughts or ideas) you want the user to know and messaging as the art of deciding what information or ideas you want to give to (and get from) your users.
Messaging brings your core strategy to life. It helps you define what this specific web content needs to communicate in order to get you closer to your ultimate goal. It helps you prioritize content needs, keep content consistent, and align content owners on content requirements.
During analysis, we encouraged you to collect all the messages that exist in your content today, and what stakeholders would like added or changed. Now that you have a core strategy in place, it’s time to prioritize those messages.
Defining a message hierarchy
The key to making messages valuable and understandable is putting them into a hierarchy that identifies your message priorities. For example, a simple messaging hierarchy would contain these components:
• Primary message: The single most important thing you want the user to know after viewing your content. This message is applicable to all of your audiences.
• Secondary messages: A group of key messages that support the primary message and provide context. These messages often highlight the things that are competitive advantages or differentiators. They may or may not be applicable to every single audience.
• Details: All of the various proof points behind the primary and secondary messages.
When you put all of these messages together, you’ve got a story.
Here’s an easy way to picture this. Think of a magazine article about a business. The primary message is the title. The secondary messages are the subheads, and the details are all the sentences between the subheads.
Of course, when it comes to web content, the story’s a lot more complicated. You’ll have one major story (your primary message) and many, many subplots all linking to each other. Still, by identifying your main “stories,” you’ll have an easier time seeing the specific content you need to support, enhance, or expand on those stories (rather than random stuff you add “because you can”).
Let’s return to our friends at AwesomeCo, the up-and-coming software company who is building a corporate website. Their messaging hierarchy might look like this:
Primary message: AwesomeCo is the best-kept secret in business software.
Secondary messages:
• We don’t sell products. We sell systems tailored to your needs.
• We use open source technology, so you’re never held hostage to proprietary code.
• We work with 83 companies in the Fortune 100, new startups, and everyone in between.
• We don’t do marketing; we’re too busy making software. Our business comes from word of mouth.
Don’t mistake messages for content
You don’t have to spend days wordsmithing and agonizing over the exact phrasing and wording of messages, because they’re not meant to be copy on your website; they’re rarely shown to the user word for word. Instead, you’ll interpret the messages for each audience and situation. In turn, the messages will influence the content you select and create. The primary message, for example, will be demonstrated with different content for different audiences throughout the site. And, you may never see the actual words.
For example, AwesomeCo’s primary message might be interpreted on pages for different audiences like this:
Primary Message: AwesomeCo is the best-kept secret in business software.
Interpretations:
• For client prospects: We don’t need to advertise because all our business comes from referrals.
• For existing clients: AwesomeCo “insiders” get special treatment with exclusive resources, discounts, and perks.
• For investors: AwesomeCo stock is a hidden gem that will soon become public knowledge, so act fast.
As you might guess, messaging doesn’t always come easy. Remember trying to prioritize audiences? The very same people who had such different views on which audiences matter the most may very well have differing views of what’s most important to communicate to users. So, like anything else that involves saying “no” to someone, defining and prioritizing messages will take some wrangling. Just fall back on those listening skills (see sidebar, page 72) and you’ll do great. (Your wit, charm, and diplomacy will also serve you well. As always.)
Topics: The Subjects that Matter
Okay! Now. What do you want to talk about?
Selecting topics isn’t about brainstorming a list of interesting subjects. It’s about narrowing the field—finding the right topic areas to meet your specific set of business requirements and user needs.
Your analysis helped identify what your audience wants. Your messaging communicates what information you’d like them to understand. Now, you can select topics to focus on what will fulfill both of your needs. So, basically:
Audience + Messaging = Topics
Take AwesomeCo’s primary message: “AwesomeCo is the best-kept secret in business software.” For the client prospects audience, topics might include: case studies of problems solved for customers, solutions and services, and their development process. Of course, topics may span more than one audience. Just be sure that each topic serves at least one audience. A video of the CEO’s kid’s soccer game? Yeah, not so much.
Topic maps
You can just make a list of all your topics and call it good. But, we really encourage you to go a step further and create a topic map. A topic map shows how your topics relate to each other. It can help expedite linking strategies, metadata, and CMS planning later. And if your website or content doesn’t have a traditional navigation structure, a topic map goes from nice-to-have to necessary.
What you put on your topic map depends on how you plan on using it. In addition to showing how topics relate to each other, you can show how topics relate to user segments, messages, channels, or back-end infrastructure. A topic map can be as simple as this:
These are both pretty simplistic examples, but you get the idea. Once you figure out your topics, you’ll be able to see how they relate to, inform, and impact each other.
Purpose: Every Piece of Content Needs a Job
When people talk about “content best practices,” you often hear statements that sound like hard-and-fast rules, such as “web content should be short” or “everything should be three clicks from the home page.” Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
Your content is a complex web of interconnected pieces of information—and each piece has a job to do. Just like you use a hammer and a wrench for different tasks, you use different kinds of content depending on the content’s purpose.
Identifying a purpose for each piece of content can help you make informed decisions about what kinds of content you need. Here are a few examples of content purposes:
• Persuade: Get the user to make a decision in your favor—such as buy your products or agree with your opinion.
• Inform: Provide the user with information about a specific topic—for example, if a user wanted to learn about breeds of dogs or the fascinating life of Jessica Simpson.
• Validate: Give the user access to specific facts, so they can fact-check stuff like the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue (1492) or the dictionary definition of flibbertigibbet (a flighty, talkative person).
• Instruct: Teach the user how to do a task, like bake a pie, find a doctor, or set their Facebook privacy settings.
• Entertain: Help the user pass time. True entertainment content is rarely on a corporate site, but on a site like YouTube or Yahoo!, you’ll see a lot of it. You know, cats playing the piano and all that.
It’s worth noting that specific content may fulfill more than one purpose. Later in the process, when you’re working with page tables (see page 125), knowing the purpose for each piece of content will help you determine what fits and what doesn’t.
Voice and Tone: Watch Your Language
As a person, you have one voice. However, when you speak, your tone of voice changes depending on who you’re talking to, what you’re talking about, and the message you’re trying to convey.
That’s exactly how to think about your company’s voice and tone when it comes to content. Your company has one brand voice that has a distinct personality, style, or point of view. That voice can take on different tones in different situations and for different purposes, all depending on your specific audience.
Defining voice
When you tackle defining your organization’s voice, start by looking at any brand materials you have. The voice might already be defined for you. Consider how it feels, what values live behind it, the different media in which it might manifest. To explain it to content creators and others, select clear, recognizable adjectives. For example, if you’re a financial services firm, your brand voice might be “trustworthy, straightforward, and authoritative.” If you’re a large university, your brand voice might be “aspirational, inclusive, and authentic.”
Defining tone
Now, look back at the information you collected about your audiences. Combine that with what you know about the user’s native voice and the objective of the specific website or channel content you are creating. Pick some words or phrases that describe how tone may shift for each audience. Funny? Enthusiastic? Calming? Helpful? To see this in action, check out the MailChimp case study on page 113.
It can help to look for example content from your existing content catalog, compare against your competitors, or review sites you (or your target users) like as examples.
Cultural differences
Just a quick note, here: Obviously, different cultures have different communication styles. Because we need to make sure our personality is understood in all our markets, our style may vary across countries—even different states and regions—to allow for cultural and linguistic differences. If necessary, get help defining a tone of voice that fits the cultural norms in each market.
Source: Where your Content Comes From
The good thing is, there are several options for acquiring content to fulfill your content strategy. The bad news is, there’s no truly easy way to go “get content” that will automatically make your content strategy succeed. Even if you buy or license ready-made content, editorial oversight is still required to ensure that co-created or third-party content meets your organization’s brand guidelines, web standards, and user needs.
Let’s look at the pros and cons of each option.
Original content
Content created by and for your organization is usually the most valuable kind of content: It’s unique to you, it reflects your specific points of view, and it’s communicated in your voice and tone. It’s also the most expensive. But, when you take the time to really understand your audiences, create content specifically for and about them, and then deliver your content in formats that engage and motivate, you’re delivering the kind of user experience that will bring people back for more.
To create original content, you (obviously) will need to do a lot of work collecting source material and generating new ideas. This can be time-intensive, so be ready to invest the necessary resources to make it work. (See Chapter 9, People, for more details.)
Co-created content
Big brands are making the most of high-profile bloggers, studios, podcasters, and other entities who are already in the business of creating content for an engaged audience or subscriber base. And that’s smart.
If you’re a food company, consider reaching out to popular food bloggers and hiring them to create content for your brand, either on your website or another sponsored channel. If you’re a city or state visitors’ bureau, partner with local photographers who will regularly upload photos to an online photo album featuring the best of your area. While you do give up some control of the content being generated with this approach, you’re gaining built-in audiences, unique perspectives that can complement your brand strategies, and the opportunity to experiment with a wide range of content types, often for less time and money than would otherwise be involved.
Aggregated Content
There are also ways to collect content created elsewhere. One way is to automatically aggregate content from other websites or sources (which, of course, must be accurately credited). This can be accomplished in several ways. For example, you can pull content with an RSS feed, which automatically collects content from the websites or feeds you subscribe to. You could also create search algorithms, which pull content based on specific keywords or phrases.
There are a range of risks that come with taking this approach—everything from dumping too much content on your users that ultimately gets ignored to unknowingly publishing something that gets your organization in trouble. One of the more important risks, here, is that content is being published or linked to from your organization without any sort of qualitative review. Yes, the tools provide a filter of sorts, bringing in content they calculate to be of some worth. However, you’re making a big assumption, based on subscription choices and keywords, that content will have relevancy and context for your audience. If it doesn’t, you’ll lose their attention and, potentially, their trust.
Curated content
Another way (and, for us, the preferred way) to collect content is to have someone research and curate content with an editorial point of view. Social media consultant Beth Kanter writes:
Content curation is the process of sorting through the vast amounts of content on the web and presenting it in a meaningful and organized way around a specific theme. The work involves sifting, sorting, arranging, and publishing information. A content curator cherry picks the best content that is important and relevant to share with their community. It isn’t unlike what a museum curator does to produce an exhibition: They identify the theme, they provide the context, they decide which paintings to hang on the wall, how they should be annotated, and how they should be displayed for the public.*
* http://www.bethkanter.org/content-curation-101/
Please note that content curation is not the same as asking users to provide content reviews or ratings. Simply asking your users to rate your web content does not ensure that the most relevant, valuable content will be surfaced; overall ratings can be seriously skewed by just a few active (and opinionated) users. It’s a way to surface content, but it’s not curating it.
Licensed content
If your content strategy includes offering a deeper library of online resources than you have the infrastructure to create, you may choose to license content created by a third-party publisher. (In this instance, it would also be the content strategist’s responsibility to research, review, and recommend third-party content providers.)
Articles, images, audio, and video are all widely available for licensing online. Again, you may be risking brand dilution by offering generic content to your online users. However, this is a hugely popular (albeit questionably successful) option for a wide range of industry websites. For example, health insurers license content from WebMD, Staywell, the Harvard Medical School, and more.
Don’t forget that licensed content still requires research and oversight. You’ll also need to decide if you’re just going to publish everything or manually curate it for your audiences.
User-generated content
Another way to source content is to invite users to create it themselves. For example, you may launch a community forum focused on product support, anticipating that users will essentially create “help” content for each other. Or you may invite users to create their own content as part of a brand campaign. If you choose the user-generated content route, be forewarned: without proper planning and oversight, these tactics can go awry. Case in point: An SUV manufacturer once invited their users to co-create commercials promoting a new SUV model. The campaign backfired when environmentalists stormed the virtual gates, creating commercials that damned SUVs as gas-guzzling, nature-killing, road-hogging beasts.
No matter what, don’t just dive in to user-generated content tactics. Plan, test, measure, respond. Just because it works beautifully for some brands, doesn’t mean it will for yours. Proceed with caution.
Final Note: You Can’t Always have (all of) What You Want
Now you have your messages, topics, formats, and sources nailed down—great! Let’s do this thing! Let’s make some content!
Whoa, there. It’s tempting to jump right in and start creating or collecting content just so you have something to show your boss or client. “See? We’re out there, doing stuff!” But trust us: that is the path to suffering and doom. Over the years, we’ve seen it again and again: Organizations commit to an amount of content they simply can’t sustain. They launch websites with unfinished or subpar content no one really had time to generate in the first place, let alone pay attention to once it went live. They create newsrooms and blogs that languish after only a few months. They start YouTube channels, but aren’t sure what to broadcast (except commercials).
So, when the content you want is too much content for your resources to create and maintain—at least immediately—how do you prioritize what content gets done or done first? Brain Traffic’s Lee Thomas has developed the following criteria:
• Requirements: Is the content required for some reason (legally, politically, for funding, etc.)?
• Reach: Which audiences is the content likely to reach, both today and in the future? How big are those audiences?
• Relevance: How important and interesting is the content to users? (The answer is likely to affect reach.)
• Richness: How valuable or unique are we able to make this content?
• Revenue: How will the content affect site revenue-generating activities (actual product sales, ad sales, etc.)?
Most of these criteria are somewhat subjective. It can be helpful to create a scorecard, where each topic, piece of content, or content category is given a score (on a scale of 1–5) for each of the other four “R”s. The content with the highest overall score stays, the lowest scoring content goes. The cut-off, which is somewhere in the middle, is defined by your timeline, budget, or resources.
Okay! Substance ... BAM. Done. Moving on to ... structure! (Insert sound of party horns.)
Structure
How will your website or other web content be structured? How does the navigation work? What pages live where? What content goes where, or on what page? How do things link together? What elements are on every page of the website?
My, you ask a lot of questions. It appears that you’re ready to take on your next big challenge: structure.
Whose Job is it, Anyway?
Figuring out how your content will be structured might sound like a job for an information architect (IA) or a user experience (UX) designer. And sometimes, it is. But sometimes content strategists consider creating a sitemap and wireframes to be part of their job. Some want nothing to do with it, preferring to focus on core strategy, workflow development, or editorial considerations. Sometimes the content strategist, an IA, and a UX designer all work together. Sometimes it’s all the same person. It really doesn’t matter what your title is. Someone just needs to get the content work done.
Another angle: IAs frequently focus on structure and functionality, not the overall story and page-by-page content details that will be housed (or powered) by that structure. So, if you’re doing a content strategy, and the information architecture is being done by someone else, you probably still have structural work to do. If you own the content, you’ll need to be a part of all IA documentation reviews to ensure that it meets content requirements.
What do you need to do?
To figure out how content should be prioritized, organized, formatted, and displayed, you’ll have to make a lot of decisions. There are high-level decisions (What channel should we use?), decisions about minute details (How will we label that web page?), and everything in between. Here are just a few of the elements you’ll need to consider:
Channels, platforms, and formats
At some point, you need to decide where you want to make your content available. That means you’ll need to choose channels, platforms, and formats.
• Channel is the place or service through which you are communicating with your users. Examples: email, websites, SMS.
• Platform is the technology upon which you build your content or service in order to deliver or exchange content. Examples: content management system, mobile technology.
• Format is the way in which information is presented. Examples: text, audio, video, or images.
The primary question is, how can we get the right content, to the right person, at the right time, and in the right place? These decisions, like so many others, are not the sacred domain of the content strategist. But, when the time comes, here are some key content-focused questions to bring to the table:
• What are the best formats to communicate (and demonstrate) your key messages? For example, if you’re a tool manufacturer, and you target the home do-it-yourself market, you may want to invest in a series of how-to articles focusing on home projects. It also might be smart to produce a video series showing how to do those same projects step-by-step.
• Are these formats achievable? It’s easy to brainstorm great ideas, but they’re useless unless they’re workable. Do you have the time and resources to create a video series? If you decide on a weekly podcast, can you commit the time to prepare for the podcast, record, edit, and publish it?
• Where are your audiences? We talked about channels in Chapter 6, Analysis. Look back at your user research and determine which channels will be most effective. Think about where your users are, who they’re interacting with, what they use those channels for, and so on.
• How “portable” should your content be? Users love to share content—they link to it, email it, embed it in their blogs. Will your content formats encourage or discourage this sharing? Are you comfortable letting your content “be free,” or are there copyright or legal considerations that prohibit it?
A brief note about social media: “Social media” is plural for “social medium”; that means social websites and services are channels you use to deliver content to and receive content from your audiences. Is your CEO blogging? She’s creating content. Is your intern tweeting? Content. Do you have a Facebook page that you’re updating now and again? Content.
Here’s another thing to consider: Just because you know where your audiences are doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good place to talk to them. Case in point, take Facebook. Brands have jumped at the opportunity to build a presence on Facebook. Some of them have been quite successful. But many of them are out of place and generally ignored. Do I really want to become a fan of my neighborhood plumber on Facebook? No. I do not. I am too busy taking the “Which Star Wars Character Are You?” quiz and arguing with my mother on her profile wall.
Don’t waste time delivering content where your audiences don’t actually want you to be. Get their permission. Be supportive, not interruptive. Be persuasive, not overly persistent. Meet them in the middle.
Navigation and nomenclature
When users get to a website or similar channel, they need to be able to find the content they need quickly. That’s why navigation and nomenclature are so important.
Nomenclature is the task of identifying which labels will be assigned to different components of a website. A navigation system defines how all of those labels work together to guide the user around the site.
Navigation comes in many different formats, from the traditional tree-like structure (with the home page at the top, main categories underneath the home page, and detailed content pages nested beneath the categories) to cloud-based sites with no permanent navigational features at all. What you choose depends on what the content needs to accomplish and for whom.
Nomenclature is necessary—not only for navigational menus but also for content modules (for example, the label for a sidebar on a web page). When choosing labels, it’s important to:
• Keep an eye on how labels might support key messages
• Ensure context, consistency, and clarity at every level of required labeling
• Make sure, above all else, that the labels are intuitive to end users
Links
Part of your job may be to recommend how and when certain links will appear on the page (or as a specific module). As you think through this, consider that links can, for example:
• Drive users to tasks that support fulfillment of business objectives
• Steer users toward additional, related information that may support their decision-making processes
• Offer relevant pieces of information that will further engage the user in your brand experience
• Encourage users to join an online community, participate in a social media channel, or comment on a blog
Be sure to call out where links should appear, under which circumstances they should appear, how they should be written, and any consistent calls to action.
Microcopy
Microcopy is copy you probably don’t even notice when you’re using a website. It appears in menus and next to form fields. It can act as signposts throughout a website, so you can keep track of where you are. It gives instructions, alerts you to errors, even congratulates you when you’ve completed a task.
These little words have a big impact on your user experience. Joshua Porter, director of user experience at HubSpot, has written extensively on the power of microcopy. He writes:
Microcopy is extremely contextual ... that’s why it’s so valuable. It answers a very specific question people have and speaks to their concerns right on the spot. And because it’s so contextual, microcopy isn’t always obvious. Sometimes you have to hunt to find the right words.*
* http://bokardo.com/archives/writing-microcopy/
Microcopy is often a focus in usability tests. As a content strategist, you probably can help out with some of this writing and evaluation. Ask the IA or interaction designer if you can sit in on the tests, or if they’d like your assistance early in the process.
What you should definitely do is collect requirements for microcopy—such as error messages or inline help text (that’s the text that appears right in your screen when you click or hover over a link or object). Record them in a specific document, so that you can hand it over to a writer, or at least have it for reference during final content quality analysis (QA).
Metadata and tagging
Metadata is “data about data.” It’s the specific words, numbers, and any other data that’s assigned to different kinds of content—pages, modules, products, and so on. Metadata makes content findable, portable, and adaptive to different platforms. It’s part of what web search engines look for in order to recognize and categorize content for their search results. It’s what defines the results that come up when we use our internal site search engines. Metadata can also handle the organization and display of the content, along with links between the content.
As you can see, metadata is a big, unwieldy topic. But, with new channels and platforms being introduced every few months, it’s more important than ever to consider metadata as part of structural recommendations. You should ensure that metadata:
• Accurately reflects the content substance
• Has attributes that will organize the content in an intuitive way
• Is consistent across content types and topics
In general, don’t be afraid to dig into the details behind the scenes. These words and concepts might be unfamiliar to you, but once you understand the basics, you’ll quickly recognize the power and potential of metadata.
What Tools Can Help?
For more than a decade, “good” websites followed a common structure using the traditional tree-like navigation. As a result, some of web development’s most recognized documentation tools were developed to design these sites.
Sitemaps
The sitemap is the most popular structural tool of all. A sitemap is a useful tool, no doubt; but sometimes, they fail to capture or communicate even the most basic content requirements.
Take, for example, the page stack—a stack of boxes that means “a bunch of other pages go here.” Here’s what it looks like:
In his book Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug describes page stacks as a smoke-and-mirrors way of abdicating responsibility for what actually happens after the first few levels of navigation. Krug says that, with page stacks, the IA is basically telling project stakeholders, “... and then the MAGIC happens!”
Page stacks are fine if the sitemap comes part-and-parcel with detailed recommendations about content. If it doesn’t, the content owners are stuck with no direction, no context, and no idea what should actually go on those mysteriously stacked pages. We’ll talk about how to avoid this problem later in the chapter.
Wireframes
In most IA documentation, page- or component-level content requirements are captured in wireframes (which are similar to architectural blueprints) or a prototype (a functioning version of a few pages of your website or web content components).
These tools can very accurately and effectively document content requirements for the pages they show. But, there are a few problems with them, too.
First, typical wireframes and prototypes show only a few “representative” pages of the website. (Obviously, it wouldn’t be cost- or time-efficient to do them for every page.)
Second, there’s some seriously important information about the content itself that’s missing. To close the gap, there is another layer of “design,” which considers how content—defined and driven by messaging, business objectives, and user goals—will receive the attention it deserves, at the right time in the project process.
Page tables
In order to take sitemaps and page templates to the next level, the level at which key content recommendations may be identified and explained, we need a third document, called a page table.
The page table tells you everything you need to know about the content on a specific website page (or content module): the content objective, key messages, specific content recommendations, source content quality, and requirements for how to create and maintain the content.
Here’s an example of a page table:
Page tables are easy for stakeholders to edit and change, which is critical when there are tons of pages to review. And, for writers, page tables are pure gold: Having all of the source content locations, content owners and reviewers, message priorities, specific topics, and more right there on one page—before they start writing!—is every writer’s dream come true.
When page tables aren’t enough ... or too much
On a website with hundreds, thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pages, it’s neither cost-effective nor time-efficient to create a page table for every single piece of content. Sites of this magnitude include:
• E-commerce sites: mostly product descriptions
• Encyclopedic sites: sites that offer thousands of articles, indexed by topic
• News sites: articles and other content artifacts (images, audio, video) that are typically archived both by date and topic
In these cases, you can create a content requirements template (formatted like a page table) for all pages that have the exact same purpose and use. Not “sort of similar” pages or components. Exactly similar, like a press release, a product description, or a specific type of article.
Regardless of website size, all content recommendations need to somehow be documented to assist with content creation, maintenance, and migration tasks.
Keep up the Good Work
There it is. Useful, usable content that’s valuable both to your audiences and your organization. The stuff you need to succeed.
You’ll notice, however, that the book isn’t over yet. While substance and structure are essential to a successful content strategy, good content itself isn’t enough. You need processes, procedures, policies, and—of course—the people who make it all happen. There’s an entire lifecycle to consider and plan for.
Let’s get to it.