3. content
strategy
Words cost money, so the ones you put on your site or app'd better
work hard. The best way of making sure they do is to develop a content
strategy.
Your information architecture defines the space for your content; your
content strategy decides how to fill it. It's a list of instructions that
- for each page type - tells your copywriter what to write and how to write
it.
Some content strategies are planned, some evolve by chance. Slashdot's
rage-within-quotes was a happy accident, but AOL's
retail-driven copy is planned in detail. There are three parts to a site's
content strategy: a page plan, labelling guidelines, and search systems.
The page plan is a brief to your copywriter. Starting
with the page title, it lays out what to write: how many subsections, the
direction of each section, how to wrap up. (You'd think creative types would
rail against such a prescriptive approach - but surprisingly few copywriters
will complain; they'll be grateful you've got an idea of what's needed.
A client able to describe what he needs so precisely is rare.)
Labelling guidelines are what make your site
useful. Once all that content's created, it needs titles your audience can
understand. Everything from section headers to subparagraphs need to be labelled
effectively and consistently in the language of your audience - which is a
lot harder than it looks; it's like writing a style guide for your site.
Finally, search systems are labelling guidelines
for the machines. They're the directory trees, metatags, page descriptors
for XML, RSS, and other TLAs ... structures deep within your site's subsurface
strata, responsible for giving results when a user's looking for something.
Optimising them increases search performance dramatically.
On a website it's not just the words on the page that matter; it's
also how they relate to the site's other pages. The content of the site
needs to feel smooth wherever a user goes. The document that enables it
to stay that way is your content strategy.
A strong content strategy isn't cheap - but it pays back big-time,
saving big chunks of execution time and your marketing budget. And Redpump
can create one for you. Next: application
design.