The Elements of Content Strategy - Erin Kissane [26]
Page-level content guidelines
Wireframes are wonderful things. They allow information architects to represent structure without implying anything about visual design, and they give content strategists a skeleton outline on which to arrange content. But although they often look like they’re representing the function of each page, they necessarily leave out a lot of detail that will be critically important to the people who eventually develop the site’s content—like what the content on each page is supposed to accomplish, how it relates to content elsewhere on the site, where the content will come from, and how it’s supposed to look and sound.
Unless you’re working on a very small project, you’ll want to develop content guidelines to go alongside the wireframes. I use a combination of detailed written recommendations, a content style guide, and content templates (described below) to communicate these guidelines. Depending on the project’s scope and goals—as documented in the project definition phase—the written guidelines will include some or all of the following:
Site-wide and section-specific voice and tone guidelines
Strategies for cross-linking content throughout the site
Notes on the integration of advertising content, when applicable
Social and community guidelines and policies
Recommendations on creating useful and accessible multimedia content
Plans for metadata (data that describes other data)
A content style guide includes notes on the choice of a standard style guide, house style guidelines (deviations from or additions to the standard style guide), specifications for images and multimedia, and guidelines for non-standard style in social media or other channels (executive blogs, for example).
The contents of the written recommendations and style guide will be reinforced in an even more detailed deliverable called a content template.
Content templates in 60 seconds
A content template is a simple document that serves two purposes: it’s a paragraph-level companion to your website’s wireframes, and it’s a simple, effective means of getting useful information from the people who have information to the people who can communicate that information. Each template contains information about a specific kind of page (or content module) on your website: section landing pages, articles, product pages, staff bios, job listings, and so on.
By providing your experts with a fill-in-the-blank structure for their content drafts, you can be quite explicit about what you do (and don’t) want—and can help save your writers from the hypnotic blink of a cursor on a blank page, to which so many have fallen victim.
Of course, before you can create content templates, you need to decide what each page is intended to do. The purpose of each page should emerge from a combination of your user and stakeholder research, the messages you’ve documented, and the wireframes you’re working with. You’ll also need to have a pretty good idea of how the new structure represented in the sitemap and wireframes matches up to content that already exists—for this, you’ll need to return to the content inventory and look for matches between new content needs and old content resources.
After that, you can make a content template in four easy steps (FIG 4):
In a text document, list each piece of information that must be on the page, followed by optional pieces of information.
After the name of each chunk of content, note what that content is supposed to accomplish. For example, if article abstracts appear in public search results as well as internal content management tools, they need to be intelligible to external audiences. A list of product benefits should focus on how the product will help your target readers.
List your specifications for each piece of content: ideal word count, capitalization style, list vs. paragraph vs. heading, and any notes like “avoid jargon in this section—look for words that will make sense