Content Strategy. For web communications, it’s on the forefront of the mind of every industry professional these days. Or it should be. As an industry we’ve been focusing on the container not the content for years now. To be fair, it’s only recently that the technology developed to a point where we didn’t have to work so hard to coax code and graphic design to do what we wanted it to do and could think of concentrating on other things.
Like the reason we make websites in the first place.
Content Strategy reminds us that we’ve been putting the cart before the horse for quite some time now. And as an industry we are waking up to that fact and making changes to the very production process of web communications. Recently I read an interview with Karen McGrange, an upcoming speaker at the Do It With Drupal conference. Karen is a Content Strategist at Bond Art + Science. In this interview while discussing the importance of content, she nailed it:
I think so much of web design and development is approached as just that: design and development. What does it look like and feel like? What are the technologies we’ll use? How will we code this? There’s been this third leg of the stool, the content, that we’ve never really talked about, or we’ve treated as somebody else’s problem. We say, “Oh, that’s the client’s problem!” or, “We’re going to come in, and we’ll do a redesign and put in a CMS, and that will solve everyone’s web problems!”
One commenter of the above article extended what Karen had to say by saying:
Content is rarely the focus of web redesigns and this often leads to massive budgets being used to create incredibly attractive “containers” (and of late, attractive and ‘responsive’ containers).
Really good stuff. Everyone must read this.
(via Kristina Halvorson)
