Lo-Fi Content Strategy and Whiteboard

Content strategy documents and artifacts are not automatically accessible for all that may need to actually use them. Take a “simple” copydeck for instance– one of the lowest of the low strategy documents. This is where the rubber meets the road. End users of this document could be developers, programmers, and content management specialists. But [...]

A web content inventory can pay for itself a few times over

A website content inventory enables careful assessment of a website as it exists at any point in time. A content inventory can be used during the planning phases of a web project or at any point in time a clear accounting of content, including links, calls to action, pages, tone and voice, etc. is needed. [...]

Reusable Web Content

There are a lot of websites that contain content that may appear elsewhere on the site or could at some point in the future. Button text, calls to action, link text, notifications and disclaimers, promotional content and informational text are some examples. Maintaining like content across multiple websites or webpages can quickly become cumbersome. The [...]

QR Codes: Sample Calls to Action

I have a little fetish for QR codes and I’ve especially become fixated on the calls to action that are being used in combination with these not-so-odd-anymore codes. List of qr codes and calls to action I’ve found so far: Aetna: “See the proof and the savings at smarteris.aetna.com/estimator, or just scan the code.” Asus [...]

What Color is Your Web Content? Breaking the Monotony of Content Strategy Documents

Ethereal ones and zeros assemble to give web content its shape and form. And yet we loooooove to copy and cram it into spreadsheets for the sake of evaluation and analysis. We should be able to walk around content, looking at its shape, even its ….. color. Ideally, there should be other options for analysis. [...]

Adding Message Maps to a Content Strategy

Why mapping messages can strengthen customer engagement, win you trust, and fortify your overall content strategy. Recently I’ve built into my own strategy toolkit this little content artifact that I would probably not fly without ever again. I’ve dubbed it a “message map” because that’s precisely what it is. When you have a complex user [...]

Quick Examples of Voice, Tone, and Style

Tone and style figure prominently in a content strategy, but they are powerful ways to strengthen any kind of content, particularly that of a business, organization at large or the content on a website or as part of a standalone work. How do you establish a tone and voice? Identify and explore the content goals [...]

The Content Strategy Behind QR Codes

Back in February of this year I noticed a few advertisers using QR Codes in their ads so I wrote a post, QR Codes and Web Content. Since then the number of early adopters has risen sharply and you hear a lot more about how these crazy looking bar code-y thingies are being used. How [...]

Exercise: Mapping A Site’s Key Content Messages

For larger websites that incorporate various types of customer messaging, I’ve found it helpful to sketch out a high level message map. I’ve used a sitemap and a UX user flow diagram to do this, but I could just as easily have sketched something out on a paper napkin.   Identify the site’s major sections [...]

Got Content? Now What?

Got web content? Once we have  content what do we do with it? Creation Curation Implementation Evaluation Renovation Now that I have many pages of content, my job becomes a kind of constant caretaking, a lot of my responsibilities falling into the above categories. I can also start asking myself the following: Is any of [...]

Loosening the Grip on Web Content

No matter how you look at it, web content and copy is personal. That’s been my experience across the board. What’s been most surprising, though, is that larger clients with multiple stakeholders present the biggest problems with “ownership” of content versus small online business owners and marketers. “Corporate” isn’t disengaged at all, in fact stakeholders [...]

Confounding Web Content

I haven’t missed a month of posting for a long while now, so before September closes I need to come out of my copy daze and write something. It started out harmlessly enough, a long vacation at the beach, good intentions to whip off some fresh posts. Didn’t happen. Vacation happened, but I really unplugged…except [...]