Everything is content
Posted by Jill Brown on July 19th, 2007Everything is content? What about design? Yes, it’s content. Structure? Content. Metadata? Also content. Well, “Literally, everything is content.”
How did the need for detailed focus on content emerge in the heavily visually oriented field of web design? As website functionality has increased and web users have become savvier, sites have had to meet the demand for sophisticated interaction and more content to support it. But simply more content won’t do; it has to be accurate and relevant. It has to be meaningful.
The question “What constitutes sameness?” may seem somewhat academic, but it has very practical implications when you’re setting up a content management system (CMS). How you capture an article and its translation can make a huge difference in how that article is produced, published, and ultimately, used on the site. The way an image and its resized and cropped versions are stored in the CMS will likewise have a huge impact on both production and access.
Critical mass
If you’re presenting a very small amount of information you can (arguably) just put it out there and let people make sense of it.
A very simple website may not require much IA or content strategy.
Start adding more information and, pretty quickly, you’ll need to apply some structure to it to help people find their way around. Apply organizing principals and visual cues so that people can look at a site and quickly know what’s there, without having to think about it too much.
To make navigation a little more human and impactful, you may want to consider carefully crafting the labels that are used on the buttons and think about what sort of language best conveys the messaging of your site.
A more complex site requires some organization
As we start to design and build websites with massively larger volumes of content, we find that often they’ve outgrown the ability of individuals to manually organize them. Now we need automation and complex algorithms to find that needle in the haystack. We need the content to include inherent meaning that makes sense to machines, for example, to support data-driven applications based on search, browse, and related links. A content management system can be invaluable, particularly to e-commerce sites. Even more invaluable is a content management system that includes essential tools like compliance, reporting, and tools for organizing contacts in ways that helps you target unique audiences effectively.
Time to get practical
So, when we’ve figured out who’s going to be responsible for the content, how do we go about infusing it with meaning?
To make content that’s relevant to people, we choose the words and sentence structures that will best contribute to achieving our communication goals. The voice should be based on a deep understanding of the intentions of the content creators, as well as the needs of the content consumers.
To make content more useful, we structure it and define standard elements so that the content can be used and reused dynamically. We write taxonomies and add metadata so that the content can be identified more easily. We create relationships between content so that it has more context and can support a variety of complex functions.
To make content more efficient to produce, we evaluate and recommend solutions for creating, enhancing, organizing, and using content, including content management systems, metadata tools, search engine optimization, and specials columns containing invaluable cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. We establish workflows that will optimize the use of these tools and systems.
To make content comprehensive, we determine content requirements for a site, inventory existing content, identify gaps, evaluate possible sources for additional material, and manage the process of getting that content into production. Given the right background or source material, we can write labels, overviews, or even longer content if needed.
Isn’t it nice that all you have to worry about is typing your well-crafted words into the ReThink Engine?
