Topics: Content: Content Strategy
If content strategy is all that stands between us and the next fix-it-later copy draft or beautifully polished but meaningless site launch, it’s time to take up the torch—time to make content matter. (13 articles)
Words that Zing
by Colleen Jones
Issue 300February 9, 2010
When someone consults a website, there is a precious opportunity not only to provide useful information but also to influence their decision. To make the most of this opportune moment, we must ensure that the site says or does precisely the right thing at precisely the right time. Understanding the rhetorical concept of kairos can help us craft a context for the opportune moment and hit the mark with appropriately zingy text.
The Content Strategist as Digital Curator
by Erin Scime
Issue 297December 8, 2009
As the digital landscape becomes increasingly complex, and as businesses become ever more comfortable using the web to bring their product and audience closer, the techniques and principles of museum curatorship can inform how we create online experiences—particularly when we approach content. Erin Scime shows us how.
Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision
by John Ferrara
Issue 292September 22, 2009
Despite the fact that site search often receives the most traffic, it’s also the place where the user experience designer bears the least influence. Few tools exist to appraise the quality of the search experience, much less strategize ways to improve it. But relevancy testing and precision testing offer hope. These are two tools you can use to analyze and improve the search user experience.
Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up
by Lou Rosenfeld
Issue 292September 22, 2009
Top-down analytics are great for creating measurable goals you can use to benchmark and evaluate the performance of your content and designs. But bottom-up analysis teaches you something new and unexpected about your customers—something goal-driven analysis can't show you. Discover the kinds of information users want, and identify your site's most urgent mistakes.
Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering!
by Avinash Kaushik
Issue 292September 22, 2009
Your search and clickstream data is missing a key ingredient: customer intent. You have all the clicks, the pages people viewed, and where they bailed, but not why they came to the site. Your internal site-search data contains that missing ingredient: intent. Learn five ways to analyze your internal site-search data—data that’s easy to get, to understand, and to act on.
The Case for Content Strategy—Motown Style
by Margot Bloomstein
Issue 290August 18, 2009
Over the past year, the content strategy chatter has been building. Jeffrey MacIntyre gave us its raison d’être. Kristina Halvorson wrote the call to arms. Panels at SXSW, presentations at An Event Apart, and regional meetups continue to build the drum roll. But how do you start humming the content strategy tune to your own team and to your prospective clients? Listen up and heed Aretha Franklin. No, really.
Content Templates to the Rescue
by Erin Kissane
Issue 287July 7, 2009
As an industry, we’ve learned to plan our sites to achieve business goals and meet human needs while shipping on time and delivering compelling user experiences. Alas, despite all the sweat we pour into strategy sessions and GANTT charts, we still have to coax content out of our subject matter experts and get it onto every page of the site. This is where the strongest hearts grow frail, and even seasoned developers reach for Advil or something stronger. But help, in the form of content templates, is on the way. Seize the power.
Content-tious Strategy
by Jeffrey MacIntyre
Issue 274December 16, 2008
Every website faces two key questions: 1. What content do we have at hand? 2. What content should we produce? Answering those questions is the domain of the content strategist. Alas, real content strategy gets as little respect today as information architecture did in 1995. MacIntyre defines the roles, tools, and value of this emerging user experience specialist.
The Discipline of Content Strategy
by Kristina Halvorson
Issue 274December 16, 2008
It's time to stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. If content strategy is all that stands between us and the next fix-it-later copy draft or beautifully polished but meaningless site launch, it’s time to take up the torch—time to make content matter. Halvorson tells how to understand, learn, practice, and plan for content strategy.
Writing Content that Works for a Living
by Erin Kissane
Issue 271November 4, 2008
Most web copy is still being written by people who aren't writers and don't have time. The good news? Anyone who touches copy can make a difference by insisting that every chunk of text on the site do something concrete.
The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome
by Pepi Ronalds
Issue 259May 20, 2008
Clients love to write copy. Well, they love to plan to write it, anyhow. On most web design projects, content is the last thing to be considered (and almost always the last thing to be delivered). We’ll spend hours, weeks, even months, doing user scenarios, site maps, wireframes, designs, schemas, and specifications—but content? It’s a disrespected line item in a schedule: “final content delivered.” Pepi Ronalds proposes a solution to this constant cause of project delays.
Greatest Copy Shot Ever Written
by Nick Padmore
Issue 248November 6, 2007
"Got Milk?", "Don’t leave home without it", "Good to the last drop." You know these taglines and the products associated with them. So what makes a great copy shot? Is there a formula? And can understanding advertising help us write better web copy?
Better Writing Through Design
by Bronwyn Jones
Issue 242July 31, 2007
How is it that the very foundation of the web, written text, has taken a strategic back seat to design? Bronwyn Jones argues that great web design is not possible without the design of words.
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