The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [24]
Like visual design and information architecture, content strategy is an iterative process, moving gradually from the general to the specific. Back in the 1990s, when you loaded a webpage with inline JPEG images, they started out looking like classic Nintendo characters and gradually came into focus. So too will your content strategy work gradually evolve from blocky, abstract outlines into crisp photographic detail.
Messages
Some projects and organizations require content strategy work that focuses primarily on streamlining existing content, filling a few gaps here and there, and establishing solid, sustainable processes for workflow and governance. Others require substantial creative development work and the advancement of new concepts.
Either way, you need to document the main ideas—the messages discussed in Chapter 1—which you will convey to your users. Each separate audience will probably have its own subset of messages that lives under the umbrella of site-wide messages. If the organization already has a list of messages to be communicated, you can simply adopt those that make sense for your project. If they don’t, you’ll need to collaborate with the appropriate teams to develop one. Don’t be afraid to give homework to the client, or to your marketing/corporate communications people, if you’re on staff.
Although you may develop some messages from whole cloth, most will probably emerge from your client’s existing communication strategy. If you lack a communication strategy on which to build your content work, plan to spend extra time getting approval for your high-level recommendations, because they’re likely to spark substantial internal debate.
Don’t get bogged down on message development. Messages are important, but they’re an internal tool, and as such, should be developed only to the point of optimum usefulness. Spending an extra week fiddling with message copy means losing a week you probably can’t afford to lose. As Halvorson notes:1
Messages aren’t content. They’re used to shape content. So, as you create your content for each page and component, you’ll interpret the messaging for the audience and page context.
Once you have the main ideas you need to communicate arranged in a hierarchy, validate them with the client, revise, and move on.
Big concepts
As you begin to understand the structure of your content, you may wish to begin introducing major departures from the existing content and features to your colleagues and client. Not at the wireframe level, or by talking about specific pages—it’s not time for that yet. Think of this part of the project as the equivalent of a particularly sexy pitch in the advertising world: you’re introducing new concepts and big ideas, not tweaks and minor revisions.
There are two reasons to introduce major conceptual changes before structural design begins. First, by explicitly introducing big changes as strategies, you’ll be able to discover gaps in your assumptions and make any required course corrections before you begin developing tactical plans. Second, when you introduce new concepts early on, you give large, complex organizations a chance to ease into new ways of thinking. Doing so almost always softens reflexive resistance to new ideas and gives you (and your champions on the client team) time to allay fears and win over dubious stakeholders. So what qualifies as a major concept?
Substantial shifts in target audience
Important new content-related features—blogs, podcasts, wikis and other knowledge bases, editorial features (articles, essays,