The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [25]
Big changes in voice and tone
Conceptual recommendations should always include the strategic rationale behind the proposed change, and should support this rationale with findings from user, stakeholder, and competitive research.
Once you have approval for the general ideas and concepts that will shape content for your project, you can begin to assemble plans and recommendations for actual content. You may wish to create a detailed set of guidelines and content needs for each site section and delivery channel, or you may only need brief written guidelines combined with content templates and examples of good and bad content.
Structural design
At some point in every online project, someone has to decide what’s going to be on a website, and sometimes what’s going to be included on other channels as well. This sequence of decisions will take into account all the work done in the project definition phase and everything discovered through user research and competitive reviews to create a structural design that meets user needs and serves business goals. The results may include a sitemap and a set of wireframes (replaced on some projects by page description diagrams), sometimes accompanied by user flows.
So is this an information architecture thing, or a part of content strategy?
This is a great question, and there are lots of answers—no two alike: Information architecture is a subset of content strategy. Content strategy functions should be folded into information architecture like blueberries into muffin batter. User experience design includes everything, content or otherwise.
In my experience, it is very easy for brilliant information architects (or UX people who do information architecture) to underestimate the importance of editorial planning, voice and tone, and detailed guidelines for content creation. And conversely, it’s very easy for highly skilled content people to underestimate how much information architecture has to do with things other than content: the finicky details of application behavior and interaction design, in particular. I’m a huge fan of collaborations between information architects who care about editorial concerns and content strategists who love structure and talking about data. But whatever your situation, it’s important to know your way around structural design, if only so that you can provide useful feedback and support.
That said, you won’t find Information Architecture 101 in this text. In the last twenty years, information architecture—and its interaction design and user experience design cousins—have developed into highly sophisticated fields with substantial bodies of professional literature. Even if you only dip your toe into the waters of structural design, I recommend that you take the time to learn the basics of IA design principles, methodologies, and deliverables.
Site-level content recommendations
Once you have a sitemap and wireframes to work with you’ll be able to return to the business goals and user needs you collected at the beginning of the project and begin fleshing out the details of your content plan.
Large websites with lots of content will benefit from content recommendations for each section of the site as depicted in the site map and wireframes. This is primarily an organizational exercise, as you will have collected the pertinent information in previous phases.
Think of this as your last chance to talk about underlying strategies, because it’s all tactical planning from here on out. High-level content recommendations typically include some or all of the following:
Primary and secondary messages to be communicated in each section’s content
Primary (and sometimes secondary) audiences to be served by each section’s content
Notes on the integration of major new content-related features into the site
Early recommendations on voice and tone
Recommendations on integrating community features (comments, forums, etc.)
A discussion of how each of the site’s major audiences will be served by its content
Recommendations