Since the dawn of this buzz word, salespeople in the tech world have been clamoring for some kind of deliverable or line-item that they can attach to “Content Strategy” and thereby affix some value to. What they’re missing is that Content Strategy is simply a design approach. It is one of many methodologies used in the User Experience (UX) process that informs design and development decisions. Developers agree that wireframes, sitemaps, and visual design comps are critical deliverables from the UX process. So when it comes to understanding the value of Content Strategy from a development perspective, perhaps it’s best to first ask “What does Content Strategy provide?”
George Lucas was often asked about the incredible special effects featured in Star Wars. His answer?
“Special effects are just a tool. A means of telling a story. A special effect without a story is a pretty boring thing. [When it comes to character development], eventually you actually take a real person and stick them into that character. And that real person brings with him or her an enormous package of reality. Threepio is just a hunk of plastic. And without Tony Daniels in there, it just wouldn’t be anything at all.”
When you strip away the mechanics and the nuts-and-bolts and the presentation of a website, you are left with the content. It is the core product. All of the other functions of a website are simply there to support the content. Branding, animations, style choices, publishing tools, delivery methods; all of these things mean nothing without content for the user to digest.
A Content Strategy is a plan for keeping the website’s content in a clear, unified direction. It is an agreed-upon process that aligns stakeholders, informs design and development decisions, and guides change. A website needs a strategy for content for the same reasons an organization needs core values: to provide a solid direction that all other processes can rally behind.
As a developer, the Content Strategy answers the overarching question of “Why?” Why are we organizing the content like this? Why do we need this process flow? Why is it important for this particular piece of content to have a template, when another one doesn’t? Why does this content need to be associated with that content? Why do we need to coordinate publishing times?
Imagine you are a developer for the “Cogswell Cogs” website. You are given a design. You are given some “lorem ipsum” text, as well as all of the legacy content from their previous website, including a handful of white papers. You know nothing about where this content comes from, how it gets published, when it gets published, how it should relate to other content, or what rules need to frame up the content’s lifecycle.
Without this direction, you do the best you can, creating content types, navigation, and features based on what you see in the sitemap and wireframes. The site may look exactly the way Mr. Cogswell was expecting. But what happens after deployment? How does the content live? Do the Cogswell Cogs employees know how to add and delete content in a meaningful way? Do they know how or why they should be relating one piece of content to another? Does the site’s search function return results in the fashion the user expects? Is there a process flow for how content gets created, edited, and published, and does that process need to be part of the Content Management System (CMS)? This is a very common scenario that often leaves you wondering “Did I really set my client up for success?”
Now imagine that you are a developer for the “Spacely Sprockets” website. You are given a design, real content, and a Content Strategy. You know that two Spacely Sprockets employees will be contributing content to the website on a weekly basis. You know that they want a way to relate articles and blog posts to their sprockets product information. You know that they want to see their search results categorized by sprocket type and sorted by date. You know that they occasionally have events such as the annual Sprocketfest that might need special attention on the website, and that Sprocketfest promotional content will be removed once the event has passed. You know that Mr. Spacely has appointed one of his employees to be the ultimate authority when it comes to content on his website, and that this user should have the appropriate permissions and functions available to them in the CMS.
Armed with the understanding of how Spacely Sprockets plans to conduct business through their website, you now have the information you need to configure the CMS with accuracy. Using the Content Strategy as a guide, you can be sure that you have left Spacely Sprockets with the tools necessary to maintain their content, and that they are comfortable with their role when it comes to using those tools. You can sleep well, knowing that you have indeed set your client up for success.
So, does a developer need Content Strategy? Absolutely. Consider the following parts of a CMS project.
Content Types - Does all content always need to fit into a repeatable pattern? Or are some types of content so rare that they are better off as custom code?
Taxonomy - How does one type of content relate to another? Is it a parent-child relationship? A one-to-many relationship? A many-to-many relationship? Is it important to create a minimum number of relationships between content pieces? Is it appropriate to use free-tagging?
Navigation - How is the content organized? Does content always have to be nested under a menu? If not, how does the user navigate to the content? How does the content creator associate that content with its navigation?
Search - Is a keyword search enough, or is a faceted search required? What does the search results page look like? Does the user expect to find certain content types represented a certain way on search results pages? Do results need to be categorized or sorted? Should the user have sorting or refining controls on the search results page?
Publishing Process - How many stages are there in the publishing process? How many roles need to be involved? Is it a linear process flow, or something more complex? What kind of business rules need to be adhered to in the publishing process? Is there a schedule for when content should expire? Is expired content archived? Deleted? Re-purposed? Does the content approval process need to be part of the CMS, or should the CMS simply be treated as a publishing platform?
SEO - Do you need to provide special fields for metadata? How does the content creator differentiate between trimmed/summary content and the main content? Does the content creator have control over the number and type of headlines used? How does the content creator control which content appears in which order on a landing page or search results page?
Section 508 - Does the content creator need to handle accessibility? Does the CMS need to provide a way for the content creator to control ARIA attributes? Does the CMS need to provide a way for content creators to add “alt” tags to images or captions to videos? Does the CMS need tools to convert certain types of content (such as MS Word documents or PDFs) into accessible formats?
Multi-Lingual - Does the content creation process need to account for other languages? Other countries? Contexts that combine both a language and a country (such as French and Canada)? Does the CMS need to provide a way to enter right-to-left (RTL) text (such as Arabic)? Does the site need to support Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK) characters? How will a content creator control these options?
Legacy Content - What does the CMS need to consider in order to support old content? How will the legacy content be imported? What does a content editor need to do to curate legacy content?
All of the above questions can be answered by a well-formed Content Strategy. Without one, as developers we are left to make assumptions about how the end user and the site maintainers will interact with the content. This introduces the serious risk that a website will fall short of its purpose, that it will not be properly maintained, or that it may become stuck in an endless cycle of re-work and scope creep.
Websites can get expensive. Without direction they become stale, misguided, under-utilized, and eventually discarded only to be re-built from the ground up in another expensive endeavor. A solid vision for the role of a website as it relates to an organization can extend its life, bring in new sources of revenue, and even reshape the organization itself.
Developers, we can save ourselves and our clients a world of frustration by agreeing on an action plan for a website’s current development, ongoing maintenance, and future expansion. Whether or not you knew it, that plan is called the Content Strategy. Before diving into your next CMS build, work with your client and your UX engineer to produce a Content Strategy that everyone can agree on, and give your project the clear direction it deserves.
The post Does a Developer Need Content Strategy? appeared first on Inside the Nerdery.
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