Stairwellblog

I recently attended ‘An Event Apart‘ here in Chicago. A conference for web professionals with some of the industry’s leaders delivering messages about cutting edge design and the best practices we should all be following.

The speaker in my opinion who stole the show was Kristina Halvorson, author of the book ‘Content Strategy for the Web.’ She made the observation that content on a website is critical to its success, but is often left neglected until the end of a project. She (accurately) pointed out that many of us spend most of the time designing a website around its content and just expect it to be inserted seamlessly at some point later on. But in the real world this is not very often the case. Practitioners shouldn’t have to work around missing content for the majority of the project cycle. We have probably all encountered times when it was necessary to envision and plan for a various types of content solely on instinct and past experience because the client has offered zero input specifically on what they would like to see. In these cases usually, someone who is barely even a stakeholder, will come in at the 11th hour and tell you that instead of 5 photos there are going to be 50, or “We don’t have any video so you can just remove that player you spent quite a bit of time designing.” And what about text? That stuff doesn’t write itself. It all takes time and thought.

It should be common sense that if someone comes to a website, they are going to be looking for something (content). So we work very hard to design sites that make it easy for people to find and interact with the content they are looking for. But often times we overlook the obvious. If what they find is weak, unclear, or uninteresting, they will leave the site and probably not return. This is bad user experience, bad for business, and ultimately means that you have designed a bad site.

The lesson to be learned from Kristina’s book is that it does not have to be this way. We should make quality content a priority and begin using methods to organize the content itself early on in the design process. This means preparing content in tandem along with the Architecture, Design, and Development phases. This will ensure that the content is not only on time, but is effective and appropriate for the requirements of the business and user objectives.

Unfortunately right now, content management and strategy is generally not the primary domain of any employee at most web agencies. This means that someone will likely have to assume the responsibility on top of their already hectic work load and also be the bad guy who has to inform clients when their content needs improvement. To some, this may seem like a daunting challenge. But anyone who is passionate about good design should see this as a huge opportunity to improve the websites their company produces and to be a hero who is responsible for improved UX and better analytics scores.

Read ‘Content Strategy for the Web‘ to find out more about the various practices Kristina has developed and talks about for a living. It’s well worth it for anyone invested in website engagements of all sizes and scopes.

*note – For more thoughts on content, you can read another one of my blog post which looks at the subject from a slightly different perspective here.

Last 5 posts by tyler

• Show how it works - December 6th, 2010
• Rah! Rah! Team! - November 9th, 2010
• Show how it works - November 4th, 2010
• Dark Patterns in designing the User Experience - September 28th, 2010
• Flow & the User Experience - September 13th, 2010