CHAPTER 10 The Two Faces of Content Strategy: Balancing the Needs of Users and Editors
- Determine the current direction of the website, as well as gain a
good understanding of the project scope. - Gain exposure to the voice and tone of the website’s content.
- Find relationships between pages and current website information
architecture.
Yet this focuses only on external audiences: how people find things and
whether those things are relevant. We also need to figure out how content
lands on the website where it does, when it does and how it does.
Which means, in addition to standard inventory fields like “ID,” “Page
Name” and “Content Type,” we also have to start determining “Content
Owner,” “On-site Expert” and whether or not a page is static or changing. In
so doing, we’ll create a de facto editorial workflow, a workflow that needs
its own element of editing as well.
In content strategy, we so often talk about getting rid of ROT (redun-
dant, out-of-date, trivial) content. Workflow requires this as well. As we’re
going through website content, we should also look at areas where work-
flow has become redundant, out-of-date or trivial. Some examples of this
might be:- Sending non-legally binding copy to the legal department for
approval, - Running all content through a department supervisor instead of
empowering the content team to make their own edits, - A focus on time-based content production over relevance —
in other words, posting for the sake of posting, - A lack of editorial governance in reviewing old content or archiving
out-of-date content.
This workflow audit (like the content audit) is going to weed out the
bad parts and help us make good strategic decisions.