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 tells your content creators what to write and how to write it. For every content delivery method - web page, email, campaign execution, whatever. (A sequence of clips or a Podcast is just as 'written' as a chunk of text.) 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 proscriptive approach - but surprisingly few 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 tags and markup your audience can understand. Everything from section
headers in an XML'd document to story arcs in a webcast need to be labelled effectively and consistently in the language of your audience - which is a lot harder than it looks with Web 3.0; it's the difference between a list of doubtful links and a table of coherent information. Your content strategy is the style guide for your site; it's how people and machines recognise the value of your content before they read it.
Finally, search systems are how machines interact with your content. 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.
A workable content strategy isn't easy or cheap - but it pays back big-time, saving big chunks of execution energy and marketing budget. And Redpump can create one for you. Next: application design.