The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [23]
If you’re designing a site from scratch, you won’t have much content to audit, but you should still document available content resources: writers, illustrators or other content producers, photograph collections, existing multimedia, production resources like studio time, and so on.
Finally, this is the time to:
conduct any search-engine and traffic analysis indicated during project definition,
do any usability or accessibility reviews appropriate to the project, and
document the current state of applicable internationalization, localization, and translation initiatives.
You may find that you’re able to integrate some or all of these processes into the content inventory and audit. Once you’re done with everything, write up a short summary describing your process, criteria for evaluation, and major findings. This findings document will be useful to a much larger audience than your spreadsheets.
How green is their grass?
A competitive review generally means a mini-audit of content published by organizations that compete with yours (or your client’s)—although for some projects, a competitive review may not actually be about competitors. For a project with one company division, you might review the content practices of other divisions as well as those of external rivals. For nonprofit organizations, you may be better off reviewing sites that accomplish parallel tasks, or organizations with similar audiences or brands, than trying to study only organizations that work in the same sector as yours.
Instead of filling spreadsheets with detailed content reviews, you can almost always get away with a lighter touch during a competitive review. Go through the content you’ve identified for review in a systematic way, describing in general terms what you find, making special note of any features or content that stand out as particularly excellent or especially awful. In the end, you should have a general sense of “what’s out there” as well as a list of things that seem to work well and things that are definitely to be avoided.
Synthesis
Once you’ve collected all this information, it’s time to figure out what you’ve really learned. You might take this opportunity to produce a formal, twenty-page report, or you might simply send a few emails and have some conversations in the hallway; the ideal is probably somewhere in between.
This is a good time to convey the highlights of your content audits and competitive reviews, including any “quick fix” remedies (fix broken pages, correct misspellings and inaccurate facts, switch inaccessible files to accessible versions) that can be applied to the current site without slowing the rest of the project down. It’s also a good time to amend the project brief to document anything you’ve learned that has changed your fundamental understanding of the project.
In the end, what matters is that your colleagues understand the research results in ways that will let them do better work, and that your client understands the implications of the results for the remainder of the project.
Strategy and Design
Once you have defined clear project goals and measures of success, and achieved a thorough understanding of user needs and existing resources, you’re ready to begin the strategy part of content strategy. This means taking everything you’ve learned in the first two phases of the project and developing a set of concepts, plans, and guidelines for creating and maintaining content that meets user needs and project goals.
As you read the pages that follow, you may wonder why all of these content recommendations and guidelines aren’t simply created and delivered all at once. On small or informal projects, some of them can be, and even on larger