The same way you cannot just overthrow an old system of government and traditions without first looking at how many of those traditions defined their people and kept them in check, you shouldn’t be in such a huge rush to disregard and haul out that rotten, slow, and one-dimensional CMS without finding out the reasons why, from the people that use it day in day out, how it came to be so.
Read moreAs we prepare to bid farewell to the decade’s cautious first attempt at defining itself I thought I’d repeat what I did 12 months previous and present an assortment of my favourite articles and blog entries of the past year; each just as fresh as the day they were published. Enjoy.
Read moreHow, in this modern world of furious digital content production and management, can we encourage and harness this inherent drive to create and analyse? You can’t go far wrong by bringing a sense of order and perpetual motion to proceedings. Following a continuous process of analysis, preparation, creation, and governance offers us an ideal way of producing consistently lean, user-focused, and bottom-line-affecting content for the web.
Read moreLast week the online interaction design magazine Johnny Holland searched the far ends of the earth (and down the back of the sofa) to enlist the services of four leading content strategists (and me) to help them dedicate a week’s worth of articles to this emerging-but-really-quite-old-all-the-same discipline. Here’s a recap.
Read moreAnyone approaching the web content strategy discipline does so from a multitude of different backgrounds: writing, developing, designing, and marketing to name but a few.
All have taken up the challenge because they care about content on the web and the vital role it plays in delivering a great user experience.
By applying these diverse skills and experiences web content strategists are able to make a wide-ranging impact on a web team or project.
Read moreI believe a retrospective approach should be taken with your archived web content. Someone, somewhere (you perhaps?) took the ultimate decision to remove that flash element or replace that call to action. Why? Maybe you saw it as no longer relevant or useful for your audience, maybe its timely nature meant it always had a limited exposure time, or perhaps it just was your PHP developer’s ugly die() function error message that was removed with little mercy?
Whatever the reason(s) behind its removal, start to ask yourself, and others who were involved in its creation and upkeep, some questions. What impact (if any) did it make? What did it contribute to the overall business goals? What did it help you achieve? How was it used by your audience? Was it the catalyst for more of this type of content? Was it ultimately a success or a failure?
Read moreAt the end of its own operational life, usually spanning several decades, a nuclear power plant will begin an equally lengthy process of decontamination, dismantling, and waste management.
Such are the dangers of handling and removing radioactive waste this procedure, called decommissioning, aims to minimise the risks by following a set of strict regulations that ensures public health and safety as well as the protection of the environment. Only when all traces of radioactive material have been removed will the public restrictions placed upon the facility and its surrounding area be lifted.
Though not a physical structure – and with a slightly less chance of damaging your long-term health – I believe that by following a rough set of stages a website can also be shut down effectively and with the user in mind throughout.
Read moreWithout question the most effective way of making audio and visual content accessible to the widest audience – including those with disabilities – is through the provision of text-based alternatives. Why? Because information rendered in electronic text can be easily enlarged for people with low vision, spoken aloud so that it’s easier for people with reading disabilities to understand, or rendered in whatever tactile form best meets the needs of a user. So what are some of the text-based options available to us for different types of audio and visual content? What could we be doing? What should we be doing? And how can a web content strategy help?
Read moreFor those of us unable to reach Paris last month for the Content Strategy Forum and rub shoulders with a room full of people who think about web content more than is considered healthy, STC France have kindly published videos of all the presentations in the plenary hall, including the keynotes by Kristina Halvorson and Rahel Bailie. So make yourself comfortable, grab a notebook and pen, and pour yourself a glass or two of wine (preferably French). It’s just like being there.
Read moreIt’s just shy of eight months since I charted the number of delicious bookmarks tagged with ‘content strategy’ and found that there’d been a significant increase in bookmarking between the back end of 2008 and the first half of of 2009.
The data available to me at the time only went up as far as June, but we now have an additional seven month’s worth that takes us up to February of this year. Well, if that’s not an excuse to plot some more points on the graph then I don’t know what is.