Recently, because everybody’s been focusing on how to make websites that work on mobile devices, the term “mobile content strategy” has come into vogue. Content strategy is definitely important, so mobile content strategy must be super-important, right?

Not quite so fast.

Remember, there’s no longer a hard-and-fast line between mobile and nonmobile devices. And as you’ve learned so far in this book, our goal is to create websites that works across all devices, regardless of whether they’re mobile devices or not.

So you don’t need a separate mobile content strategy. In fact, a mobile content strategy is often the same thing as a regular web content strategy, except you stop ignoring mobile.

You need to continue everything you’ve been doing as part of a solid content strategy, but keep in mind that users will be accessing your content from a wide range of devices and in a wide range of contexts— you need to make sure your strategy is not leaving them out.

Producing content that works as well on mobile as it does on desktop-sized computers gives you a new set of challenges that you may not have previously considered. Make sure you’re considering them now.

First: you need far less content than you think you do.

Stay away from the idea that you should put everything on your website, just in case somebody might need any particular piece of content. Sure, online storage is so incredibly inexpensive these days that we pretty much think of it as free, but there are definite costs to all of the content you put on your site.

The first cost is to the user. The more content that’s on your website, the more content the user needs to sort through and pass by to get to the content she is looking for.

Sure, some of it may be of interest if she happens to encounter it on your site, but much of it is not. Really, does anyone need to see the past 10 years’ worth of press releases your company has issued?

Unnecessary pages on your website will clutter up the navigation and search results. Unnecessary content on a page will force the user to scroll more. The more unnecessary things there are in the way, the harder it is for the user to find what he needs, and the more likely he will give up before he finds it.

The second cost is to the website owner, who needs to devote additional resources to keeping track of all the content, organizing and reorganizing it, keeping it updated, and continually checking for broken links. The more content that’s on your site, the more likely it is that some of it will be outdated or incorrect—a potential liability if you’re giving out wrong information. You can’t just add content to your site and leave it there: it does need to be maintained.

The best time to pare down your content is before you start designing a new site, or before you start redesigning your existing site. The design process will be easier with less content, and you’ll have to do less work while building the site.

When determining what to keep, think about both your business goals and user needs.

For example, “Post all our press releases on the website” is not a business goal. Instead, a goal should be more like “Ensure media contacts can get the information they need to write articles about our business.”

Perhaps you currently post links to the 10 most recent press releases on your website’s front page, because you’re proud of your accomplishments. But that takes up a lot of real estate on the front page. The vast majority of your users are not members of the press, and the rest of the world just isn’t interested in reading your press releases. Having press releases available on a dedicated media page will make sure members of the media can still find them—they know to look for that page—and you’re not forcing everybody else to look at links that they’ll never click on. If you really want to share information about recent accomplishments, write them in a different format for the general public: short blurbs using straightforward and simple language, not business-speak.

Think too about the length of each individual piece of content. If your About Us page is 1,000 words long, you’re saying far too much. It doesn’t need to be a long and rambling story of how your company was founded, including the names of every board member for the past 30 years. Most users coming to that page want to know, very succinctly, what your website or company does. If that information isn’t provided in the first couple of sentences, users likely won’t read any further to look for it. If you absolutely must list all those board members, put them on a separate page.

Look also for content that is redundant. Even if your CMS makes it easy to put pieces of content in multiple places, don’t do it unless it’s really necessary. Not only does it take up space on the website, but it can be confusing to users. It will also mean that the same content will be showing up multiple times in search engines, which is confusing to users and can decrease your search rankings if the search engine perceives those pages to be duplicate content.

Later in this book we’ll talk about a small-screen-first approach to design, where you design a layout for small-screen devices before moving on to layouts for wider devices. Designing this way is a really great help to your efforts to pare down. When you’re trying to fit your content in a design that will fit on a small screen, it forces you to consider what’s really important and gives you a clarity that’s harder to find when you’re designing your content for a desktop-sized site first.

When redesigning an existing site, it’s a good first step to do a content audit, which is an inventory of all the content you currently have. If it’s a large site, there are probably things in there that will surprise you.

Go through the list and decide what you want to keep and what to get rid of, what new content needs to be created, and who is responsible for editing and developing each piece of content.

Once you get everything in a list, it’s easier to look at it and decide what to do with it all.

Your list doesn’t need to include every piece of content, but should have at least the categories and major pieces. If it’s a new site, you should come up with a list of the content that you plan to have on the site, and a timeline for producing it.

You can learn more about content audits by reading Donna Spencer’s UXmastery article, “How to Conduct a Content Audit (http://uxmastery.com/how-to-conduct-a-content-audit/).

Have you ever wondered how users read on a website? As much as we’d like to think they go to every page on our site and read it top to bottom, they won’t.

“If you build it, they will come” is not the motto of web content creators—or, at least, it shouldn’t be. But you could be easily fooled by the sites that are filled with lengthy press releases, self-promoting company information, and other nearly useless content that nobody actually reads.

Just because you think your product/idea/event is the most wonderful thing in the world, it doesn’t mean that anybody wants to read thousands of words about it—not even the people who have already displayed an interest by visiting your website.

Users will browse through your site trying to find the information that they want or need. You need to make sure that everything else isn’t getting in their way.

Inverted pyramid

One of the main keys to doing this well is to use a journalism technique called the inverted pyramid.

Back when newspapers were only issued on actual paper instead of on websites, editors had to deal with the problem of having to plan for a set amount of physical space that they had to fill with words and pictures each day. They had to produce the exact amount of content to fill that space, not more and not less. But it was pretty much impossible to plan everything out ahead of time, since the news hadn’t happened yet.

So when reporters wrote articles for the newspaper, they had a target word count to provide, but they also understood that if more important news happened, their stories might have to be shortened to provide space for the more important articles.

To make this easier, reporters would put the most important details of their stories in the first few paragraphs, and fill the following paragraphs with progressively less important details as well as background information. That way, if the editor needed to shorten a story to fit in a smaller space, any number of ending paragraphs could be lopped off without removing the key points. Figure 2-1 will give you a better idea of how this works.

Figure 2-1. Use the inverted pyramid approach to make sure users are seeing the most important parts of your content.

You can use the same idea when writing content for the Web—not because an editor will cut off the end of your story, but because the user is likely to do so, by not reading all the way to the end. Make sure the most important details come first, and then follow those with the less important details, which the user may or may not get to.

The words you use in your content matter, as they provide the tone. But they also determine whether or not the user can understand your content.

The average reading level of US adults is generally accepted to be around the eighth- or ninth-grade level, according to studies like the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy, sponsored by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) (http://nces.ed.gov/NAAL/). Nearly 50% of adults read below the sixth-grade level.

Those of us who are writing and editing content for the Web tend to be relatively well educated, and our reading level generally reflects that. But we need to remember that our audience is not us.

It’s easy to make the incorrect assumption that your websites’ users must be smarter or better educated than everyone else. After all, they were smart enough to choose your sites, right? But by not having accessible language, you’re losing potential customers or missing out on giving information to people who might really need it.

In recent years, a plain language movement has emerged, where content creators make an effort to produce content that is easy to understand, as well as being arranged in a logical structure that makes it easier for users to find what they need.

A side benefit of using plain language is that it actually helps all users. Most people want to get their information in a hurry—they have the entire rest of the Internet to read, after all. Even for high-literacy users, plain language will help them consume and navigate content more quickly.

You’re also assisting users who don’t speak English as their first language. This doesn’t just mean immigrants. It means foreign tourists who want to visit your restaurant, and residents of other countries who want to order your products. If your website provides information, it may not only be residents of your own country who are interested in reading that information.

A good starting point for plain language is to use simpler words, shorter sentences, and shorter paragraphs when possible. By paring down your content as discussed previously, you make sure low-literacy users don’t have to spend a lot of extra time slowly reading through content that isn’t relevant to them.

Here are some resources to help you get started with plain language:

One thing you can do to make your content easier to maintain is to make it as timeless as possible.

Not everything can be timeless, but a good way to go about this with each piece of content is to look at the content and imagine you happen to come across it in a year’s time. Does it still stand on its own?

Include years in dates whenever possible. Have you ever heard about a great annual event you wanted to attend, went to the website to see it prominently described as happening on “October 15,” and had no idea if that content described this year’s event that’s coming up, or last year’s that has already happened?

If you know information is only valid for a certain amount of time, make a note of that in the content. If you forget to go back and change it or take it down, at least someone coming across it will know it’s no longer valid.