What’s more, the talks were condensed into 5 minutes each – slavishly tied to 20-second slides so that there was no room at all for expansion. That meant we cut straight to the chase of the good stuff, and the less interesting ones were over quickly. Actually, it was a gratifying way to hear the content about content.

It also meant that we heard about 11 varied subjects in an hour, from Open Source CMS to specific copy production models and from case studies to the importance of context. I did the student thing and took notes (I have a lot to learn).

London content strategy meet up January 20120 – lightning talk summaries

Mags Hanley talked about content strategy for very small business, with an example from a client who runs a website business on her own. The crucial question is what content will make her money, and bring people into using the site? She had to be aware of the three main audiences using the website: the consumers, advertisers, and the owner herself – as she is the editor and publisher. It’s important to think tactically as well as strategically.

Tom Bamford gave a little walkthrough of semantic content. We’ve all seen the mess that is a copy from Word into a rich text editor. Content creators need a distraction-free basic toolbar and a decent grasp of semantic markup so they don’t make it even worse. Always customise your rich text editor. Then they’ll make content that reads well, to humans as well as Google, and which is more accessible.

David Farbey pointed out that 90% of corporate company content is offline. Some of that will inevitably inform what ends up on the website. A strategy is needed not just for the website content but for all the content. The problem is that people work in silos and they don’t read style guides. Get people working together, sharing content, get the tech writers involved. Oh, and you’ll need a sponsor within the company to make this happen.

Steve Parks’s subject was Open Source CMS and its use in enterprise. Open source’s popularity has grown. For it to work, it’s got to be about collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. He gave a great example of Sony using a Drupal system for an artists’ website. When Warner copied the code Sony was at first hacked off. But when Warner improved it, and shared it back with Sony, they got married and had beautiful babies. All this does mean that open source developers need to approach what they do as a professional service.

Rick Yagodich emphasised the importance of context to meaning – it is the third musketeer along with content and presentation (structure). Marketers know this. They talk about segmentation. But digital takes things out of context again. Deal with your customers, contextualize for them, and for your message at the word level.

Magus were the evening’s sponsor, and Simon Lande gamely stepped up for a lightning talk to pitch their product, ActiveStandards, which cleverly tracks errors in website content.

Francois Jordaan played Eeyore. His final slide was a car half submerged in a flood. Content strategy is a great idea he said, but still mostly doomed to fail. Most companies are not ready to become publishers when it comes to the web. And training them is hard. Content is going wrong for human reasons, which we have the least power and remit to solve. We could get better at spotting lost causes at least. Has anyone seen my tail?

Joanna Pieters lifted the mood again by sharing her model for ensuring the best copy makes it to a website in the prominent position it deserves. Fraudulent copy is the copy that look good but take attention away from the best stuff. Her ‘benefits checker’ model creates practical statements for a user persona – first factual and then emotional. All copy is checked for its ability to make these statements true.

Jonny Rose charted the shift to talking about ‘experiences’ when it comes to content. This is about people as much as content. And we’re lucky to have lots of data to measure. Put this together and your CMS can start to read people. For example, drawing from peoples’ social media output to give them what they want, and pushing relevant stuff to people. Next thing you know your CMS goes bad and won’t let you back through the pod bay doors. No, wait, he didn’t say that last bit.

Michael Alves said never be content with your content. It should inform and entertain. Make it interesting fer Chrissakes! Do this, in this order: analyse, strategise, categorise, structure, create, review, approve, publish, update, archive. People don’t read advertising – they read what’s interesting to them.

Peter Springett reminded us with a twinkle in his eye that CEOs know content is important, but want to know how much it costs. It boils down to value. How are we going to deliver value? One way is to make the publishing process repeatable and reuse content. Top tip for making the most of original content is to capture and store source materials whenever you research and create content. Archive everything. That way you can get loads of articles from one piece of research. Another way to deliver value is to seek out the talent. Audit your intelligence in the business. And remember, metrics are everything. Speak the language of a CEO.

There you have it. An compact evening reduced further to a blog post. If you were there – what struck you out of the lightning talks?

So here I am, on a page featuring the particulars my house, faced with Tweet and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons.

My first thought is: I’m not putting the link on Twitter. Mainly because my followers include hundreds of people to whom my house is completely irrelevant. Why would people I’ve connected with, loosely speaking for professional reasons, want to see inside my house? That would be a bit weird.

Facebook though – that’s mostly my real friends. Or at least people I have really met and who have probably been inside my house at some point. It’s nice to throw up the odd conversation starter on Facebook, so I click the button.

Within an hour two of my wife’s distant friends text her about how tidy our kitchen looks. When she picks the kids up from school another parent is concerned that we are going to remove our son from her child’s class. I get a message on Facebook from a friend I’ve not seen for some time, asking where we are moving to. Others comment on the post.

All this is fine – but a bit strange. It feels like we are not in control of the conversation about our moving plans. I’m not so bothered about people scrutinising the pictures and the price (you can’t afford to be too precious when your underpants are visible on Google Streetview) – although I know others who would be. But I probably wouldn’t do it again.

It turns out my house sale is not something I actually want to share via social media.

The sharing buttons are there for other users too, not just vendors. But, more generally, as we pursue fans and followers across sundry social media platforms are we forgetting to ask the question: why on earth would anyone want to share this anyway?

Do people really want to share your thing?

There are still things that people want to keep quiet. Britons selling houses might be one example. We don’t want people to know that we want to move. Nor how much our houses are worth. Nor what colour our bed sheets (or pants) are.

People like to share trivial personal news, funny items, coupons and offers, and interesting articles. After that there is such a thing as too much information, and a whole slew of content that is too boring or pointless to share.

Are all social platforms equal?

I shared my house on Facebook but not Twitter because I use those two platforms differently. I don’t really use Google+.

Which social networks would be best for your users to share items from your website? Do you know how they are using the different networks? Has anyone yet found a good reason for a business to be on Facebook?

Do people really want to share every part of your site?

It must be a fallacy that the more social media buttons you put on your pages the more people will share your content. Apparently the main way of sharing content is still cutting and pasting the URL, rather than clicking a button. That suggests that offering more ways to share is not the most effective way to get people to do so. They’ll share (or ignore) the content that they want to, regardless.

I dislike the sight of a rack of social media buttons on every page of a website, and also the hassle of having to edit auto-sharing options, such as a formulated tweet. Others in the office distrust those auto-share widgets from a privacy point of view, because they are unsure what is being tracked.

Let’s keep the user experience healthy and exercise some restraint. More importantly, let’s try to understand what and why our customers want to share and on which platforms.

When might users want to share?

Also, at what point in a process might your customers want to share? One of my favourite sharing examples is when the Wiggle website invited me, just after I had submitted a review of a product I bought from them, to share the review on Facebook. One little click of a button pushed the work I had just done out to a whole new audience without any further effort on my part. (Yes, that’s the writer talking).

Most of this understanding, like my experiment with the estate agent, comes through giving it a go and seeing what happens. Overall, it is not a given that it is better for people to share your stuff and follow you on social media. Ask anyone who has had their fingers burnt by a miscalculated Groupon deal. But if you do want to encourage sharing of your content, the key is not the buttons but creating content that people want to share in the first place.

Of course, once I had talked about it, I found that not everyone in the room was quite as corporate a type as I had assumed. Even those who were quickly pointed out that it’s all the same thing really, because at any one time they are only working with a small set of people, trying to sell something to the next person in the chain.

So what is it like doing content strategy for smaller companies? New article follows the video and slides.

Budgets are squeezed and projects are little

I’m sure everyone would say that money is short. Seriously, in three years, I am yet to work on a single project with enough money apportioned for a thorough job on the content.

Our clients vary from a one-off-website-in-three-days to businesses with employee numbers in three figures who pay for continual development. From a content point of view, it is rare that a project would entail more than two week’s work.

No one buys content strategy

We talk about content strategy in our sales pitch because it shows an intelligent and ordered approach to projects. But we don’t write it into proposals because no one will pay for it as a discrete set of items.

Clients will, however, pay for design, because they have an opinion on colours and fonts and don’t know how to implement them. They will pay for development because they have no idea how that works. Same with SEO. Many clients will also buy blogs, blogging help and copywriting. All of these things act as Trojan horses for sneaking content work through the gates.

It should be said, that with longer-term clients, they begin to trust us and like what we do, so content strategy is less of a snake-oil concept. (Although take a moment to appreciate the initial topsy-turvy world where SEO is paid for hand over fist and content strategy is suspected as a con).

They may or may not have content

Some want to lift the iceberg, and put every bit of corporate marketing that they’ve ever produced on the website somewhere. But a problem that is just as common is a client having little or no content at all. This is a bit disturbing, especially when combined with a small budget and short timescale, but it’s also a fine opportunity to shape all of the content from its inception, and have a lot of input into the final substance of the application.

Doing a bit of everything

My job title is Content Strategist, although sometimes in the office I’m simply called Microcopy Man. I do a healthy amount of copywriting, and have to look at everything I do, including social media and mailing, through the lens of user experience, information architecture and marketing. To clients I’m a content expert, so that turns into consulting as well.

Smaller businesses are simply not loaded with people creating content, never mind content that is any good. Working at this level means being prepared to fill in gaps and make content happen, even if that means taking the photos or inventing the business model.

Nowhere to hide

That’s a rather negative way to say that your mistakes will be noticed and you can’t hide from the client. So good relationships from the outset are vital, and depend on constant communication. A content strategy of some sort is essential to relationships too, even if it’s basic, even if it’s not billable. Having on paper a record of what is needed and who is responsible gives you a schedule and language to deliver the project smoothly.

Satisfyingly hands on

All of this means that I get to create, and my work brings a little sunshine to those corners of the web in which it appears. It means I get to educate, to train, to see clients learn how to blog well, or start to take more care with their content. It means that I get to work closely with a fun team, doing a variety of jobs for a high turnover of projects.

Doing content strategy for small businesses is challenging, and sometimes I feel like there is not much of a roadmap for what I’m doing. But ultimately it is satisfying, and I love it when a great website comes together.

• Create once, publish everywhere
• Content creators need help
• What customers want: to accomplish tasks, quickly
• The best content supports business goals
• Sharing: marginalia and pay fences
• Even the smallest word can change the course of the future
• Nail the names and message

The post contains some links to slides, video and notes from the conference if you want to find out more.

The follow up November Event, taking place Wednesday 16 November in the same venue, picks up some of the conversations that were firing at the conference, and hopefully turns up the heat under them:

1. Kate Kenyon – Content strategy, content management tools, and the happy ending
2. Gabriel Smy – Content strategy for small businesses (yes, that’s me)
3. George Webster – What content strategy can learn from Hollywood
4. Anne Caborn – Digital governance and risk: a comparison with the NHS

My own short talk will be a summary of what I’m learning doing content strategy for smaller projects and smaller companies. It’s great to have some theory about how content strategy fits into the overall picture, but when you’ve got a tiny budget and few days to deliver a website what can you really do to make sure that content gets to shine?

Expect crafty shortcuts and random animals.

I have a friend who switched political parties when he realised that basically, his people were in the other one. The people at these content strategy events are basically sound and amazing – down to earth, creative, at times ingenious but always pragmatic. My kind of people.

So I’m looking forward to hanging out with them on Wednesday, and chipping in my tuppeny-worth. Hope to see you there too.

Show don’t tell is a core design principle here at Endis Solutions. But what does it actually mean?

Given the choice between telling someone something and showing it to them, you should almost always show it. Here’s how, and why:

1) Show me the money

If you sell, say, wigs on your web site, there is no need to write ‘we sell wigs’ on your front page (nor, for that matter, ‘welcome to our wig-selling web site!’). A picture of a wig with a ‘buy’ button will better communicate what you do and be more immediately useful to someone wanting to purchase a wig.

Why better? Because if you have to explain everything, it is tiring to read. And clamorous. And patronising. And obstructive. It puts an extra step between your customers and what they are trying to achieve.

If you have to explain what and where things are, then your site has failed. Most sites need very few words. Let the graphics and the products and the important items speak for themselves.

You have to give people what they are looking for. Show them the gallery, the archive, the offer, the details. Make it easy to see, recognise, and browse. Give them what they want without talking to them about it. Imagine entering a physical shop and being talked at by the manager before you are allowed to see any of the products!

Just browsing, thanks.

People are after something. If you’ve got it, give it, instead of asking them to solve your web site clue by stupid clue.

2) Shut up already

After visiting Cambridge for the first time, my father’s overriding impression was of being nagged. Everywhere he walked there were signs saying ‘don’t walk on the grass’ (in 7 languages), ‘no entry to the public’, ‘beware rising bollards’ and ‘bicycles attached to these railings will be removed and sold to students in Oxford’.

The words you write shout at people. It is one of the main things I hate about Windows – all those dialog boxes and pop-ups about updates and statuses when all I want is for my computer to be on.

You simply don’t need to talk at your visitors so much. Don’t write ‘click here to download the document’– simply write the name of the document and make it a link. Don’t write ‘to get in touch with us click on contact’ – simply put the word contact somewhere prominent and expected, say the menu bar.

If you can remove an instruction or description, remove it. Just like George says. If you can encourage comprehension through a graphical element such as a button or arrow instead of text, then do.

Grasp this paradox: the more you say, the less people will understand.

And if you’re blogging, don’t make the rookie mistake of writing about your writing. Instead of saying ‘Today I am going to tell you about pigeons…’, just tell us about the damn pigeons. That’s why it often pays to behead your blog posts (and 39 other useful writing tips).

Give your visitors a break and step away from the vuvuzela.

3) Do what you claim to be

The third application of show don’t tell is that if you’re not showing, then don’t tell.

In other words, don’t make claims that are undermined by your own web site, or as the Argentines might have it: ‘don’t crap higher than your ass can reach’.

Don’t say you pride yourselves on friendliness when your order process is broken and the error messages are accusatory and confusing. In fact, don’t say it at all – be friendly; in your tone, in your messages, in your support and service. Then people will believe you. And you won’t be a hyprocrite.

Instead of saying ‘our customers love us’ display a huge list of recent, affectionate testimonials. Instead of saying ‘the largest in our industry’ demonstrate your size in some way. Instead of saying ‘award-winning’ put the badge (and year) on your site.

Show, don’t tell.

As a content strategist and writer am I doing myself out of a job here? Not at all. Content strategy is coming up with a way for all that content, not just the copy, to work together (and get produced, and continue to be high quality in the future). Secondly, the few words that are necessary on your web site will be all the more valuable for their scarcity. I can help you get them right.

It makes me think of the way in which many businesses want to present themselves through their web sites.

To you, your business is a complex organisation, with a history, with staff, with processes and systems and targets. It is a many-tendrilled thing. You almost daily have challenges and triumphs, great ideas, and mistakes from which to learn. You invest in training or new software or take the staff out for team building. You get recognised in an industry award or perform way better than this time last year or have a great story to tell about your new management structure.

The question is, how much of all that do your customers need to know about?

Let’s start with absolutely none at all.

Be useful

The main difference between you and your customers is that they do not care a monkeys about your company. Harsh, but true.

So when you create a new web site, they simply don’t care about your history or your team training. About your new recruits or internal reorganisation. About your annual goals or your stated core values. Even, about your new web site.

What they care about is whether you are useful to them, right now, for doing what they are trying to do.

Everything else is noise. Adding everything else to your web site is the certain way to make it ungapatchket. You are not sharing the love; you are hiding it behind an ornamental clock made of shells that you picked up on holiday because there was nothing else to buy at the airport.

Instead of starting with all the things that you could say about your company – start with absolutely none of them. Nada. Zip. Now ask yourself, what one story should you tell your customers about how they can accomplish something on your site better than anywhere else, right now?

Find the message, the thread, the line, that explains simply to an online visitor why they should give a crap about your product or service.

One story, two trees

Once you’ve got the story, share it simply and clearly. Start by showing it, with a few images – a way to visualise the story. You’ll need a few words, too, but only a handful. Use sparingly. You need to interrogate mercilessly every element that wants to be on the site, grilling it on how it helps, uniquely, to tell the customer story. Otherwise don’t let it anywhere near.

Too many websites are trying to lift the iceberg to show customers what goes on at their companies, when customers need only see the tip.

And my solution for an ungapatchket Christmas tree? Buy two. A small one for the kids to have in their own bedroom on which they can hang anything and everything that they once made/found/ate, and a family one in the living room which has stringent editorial guidelines to keep it looking pretty.

There must be somewhere else you can hang all that other stuff.

On the one hand, I’m guessing few of us are enamoured by the language of estate agents. Although clichés can be useful for getting a standard set of information across to a loyal audience, the problem with estate agents’ lingo is that there are simpler, more honest ways to say the same thing, if it needs saying at all.

So should we be rejoicing that one estate agent, in an effort to desist from trundling out the same-old phrases, sent their staff on a poetry course? Instead of ‘direct sea views’ we are told ‘without feeling lonely, the room has an echo.’ Or try this:

Crossing the threshold
Passing into history
Near seafront and shops
Cobbles and tarmac meet

Historic Hove and the new come together in a mews house, light, comfortable and homely … and with parking.

As a lover of the way poetry shuffles about in ordinary words and situations, I think this is fun. As someone with an eye on marketing I see that the stunt has generated widespread publicity for the company. But will it sell more houses?

Solving the wrong problem

Estate agent owner Paul Bonett said he was fed up with the ‘meaningless jargon that potential buyers could see through in an instant. Boring old clichés like immaculate condition, delightful, compact and bijoux are hindering, not helping sales.’

So he wants property descriptions that we can’t see through?

At Endis Solutions we have worked with a few property agents now, as well as hunting for properties ourselves. We’re beginning to get a feel for what people want from an estate agent’s web site. And it’s not poetry.

Most people looking for properties online are trawling through hundreds of descriptions, trying to filter out the irrelevant ones as quickly as possible, flicking through what’s left to see if any of them meet their requirements and desires. It is not particularly fun and they do not have all day to do it.

Anything that slows down the process – animated picture galleries, long download times, unclear or protracted navigation, confusing text – is a pain in the neck the first time, never mind the fiftieth. And then for people to have to decipher a poetic riddle that does not actually tell them what the house is like – what a terrible idea.

Home-hunters do not dislike ‘compact’ because it is boring. They dislike it because it’s disingenuous. And no, they would not rather read draws the evenings into charming cosiness – they would prefer an agent to come out and say: it’s small. And ‘bijoux’? What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Delightful’? Isn’t that up to the customer to decide?

The problem is not that we’re bored with estate agents’ clichés, it is that they are unhelpful and unnecessary at a time when, rather boringly, we just want the facts, and fast.

No one reads the description anyway

Or at least they shouldn’t have to. If our clients are to be believed, people go straight for either the photo gallery or the floorplan to find out what a house is like. The best thing you can do on the property description page as an estate agent is make your gallery large, prominent and full of decent photographs that are easy and quick to scroll through, with a big, clearly labelled, detailed floorplan next to it. Here’s a good example.

Apart from the square footage for city dwellers, that’s pretty much everything we need to know. At a glance. It’s a classic case of show don’t tell.

It’s great to hear about estate agents getting creative in the way they present properties. My tip: give visual information, quickly. If you have to write anything after that, bare facts will do just fine.

Or am I just a killjoy? What do you find helpful when looking for properties online?

This isn’t about how smart my child is (although he can complete a Cat-in-a-Hat jigsaw in under 5 minutes reverse-side up and calculate the exact opposite of everything we ask him to do instantaneously, before implementing it without flaw).

No, the point is that in iPlayer the BBC have designed a web site so easy to use that a 2-year-old can master it.

After turning the computer on he clicks the browser icon and iPlayer opens as the homepage. From there, he clicks on an image that he recognises – perhaps Charlie, Lola or Mister Tumble – or on one that looks like it’s for kids.

Admittedly, the homepage is set to the Children’s page. But I’ve seen him get there from the front page too, by clicking on ‘Last Played’ or one of the many pictures in ‘Highlights’ or ‘Most Popular’.

Once one kids’ programme is open, he skips through a chain of large thumbnails displayed below in ‘More’ and ‘Recommendations’ until it brings up something appealing. Then he clicks the play and full screen icons, and kicks back with a little bowl of whatever he found at toddler height in the cupboard (dry noodles, honey, an unripe plum, that sort of thing).

How easy is that?

Elements of toddler-friendly design

iPlayer is doing something right that children as young as two are able to operate it. This is not news. But that someone so young should be comfortable navigating a web site made me wonder what design elements enabled his success. Here are some of my suspicions:

1) Navigation is image-based

My son can’t read a word. Not a single word. He gets the content he wants by clicking on the pictures. An adult might take shortcuts by reading the text – find the right episode straight away or employ the search box – but a preliterate child can get to the same place in time purely by clicking on pictures.

2) Images have good affordance

It is not just that the menus are images, but that the pictures are instantly recognisable (a character he has seen before) or representative (something that looks like it is for children). This provides the simple experience of seeing what you want and clicking on it to get it, otherwise known as show don’t tell.

3) Many points of entry into content and many routes between

Searching iPlayer my son rarely gets stuck. There are always more images to click on in some type of menu, scrolling gallery, or after-play recommendation. He can enter the content many ways and because they are all connected together can hop between programmes easily.

4) Identifiable and simple buttons for universal actions

iPlayer has buttons big and conventional enough for a 2-year-old to click on; for selecting, sideways scrolling, playing, pausing, and enlarging to full screen.

5) Key content above the fold, and all in one window

He doesn’t scroll down yet which shows that all this navigation is accomplished in the top part of the page.

6) One-screen experience

It helps that iPlayer works without popups or multiple windows. Otherwise he can accidentally click on the wrong window and get confused, poor chap.

Just because a web site is well designed for a non-reading 2-year-old doesn’t mean that it is well designed for anyone else. But this example proves that even with complex navigation and copious content a site can be simple to get around.

And the hardest part of the process, apart from tackling the plum? – Trying to do all of that clicking on only one side of a clunky, domed, single sprung piece of white plastic. My two-year-old might be a whizz on iPlayer, but he’s no fan of Mighty Mouse.

All this talk about SEO and social media strategy and domain names and information architecture … can’t you just have a basic site that works?

Of course you can.

What businesses are beginning to realise though, is that content strategy is part of the basic package.

You wouldn’t commission a web site without graphic design. And yet the graphics are only the means of presenting … what exactly? What is the web site there to say? What is it there to do? And how is it going to say and do those things?

Content strategy answers these questions. The story of the expensive camel introduced us to its importance for small businesses. We looked at the first four problems that it overcomes for you. Now let’s go through the next four.

Your fifth problem: your site might look great when you launch but will deteriorate soon after

Print is a one-off, fixed medium. Your web site, however, will probably be updated. It may have a blog. The public may make comments, add suggestions. Or perhaps your staff will update the articles every now and then or add new events or listings.

Unless you have an editorial guide, detailing the tone, style and formatting of content pages, then the chances of your site remaining as good as it looked at launch are zero. And back to the budget question: if you want your web site to be effective with your customers over time, then how much is it worth to have the editorial help – either one-off or ongoing – to make sure that this happens?

What use is buying a swimming pool if you never have it cleaned so no one can swim in it?

Your sixth problem: blogging is tough to keep up

There are many reasons why a blog can be a good idea on a business web site. It allows you to display your expertise, gives you control over the tone and personality of the site, works wonders for the search engines and brings your web site to life.

But there is a caveat: if you are not going to blog consistently with useful, interesting and well-written articles, it is better not to bother at all.

Blogging is harder to do than you think. After a while, ideas are hard to come by. Writing time is tricky to justify when there are a million other things you need to do for your business. The whole write—edit—check—format—check again—publish—promote cycle is much bigger than just jotting a few thoughts down. But anything less makes you look like an amateur.

If you have help, it’s a different story. Either great training and editorial guidance to begin with, or even ongoing support – a small price to pay for consistently publishing articles that bring your business to life online.

Your seventh problem: when you finally realise what you really want on your web site, it will be too late

No matter what ideas you start with, when you see your site being formed you will probably change your mind or have further ideas about it.

If there is no strategy behind what appears on the site from the beginning, this process will get tiresome and expensive. The web company will be spending time – paid for by your money – on creating a framework, structure, navigation, design – based on guesswork. When you see it and decide you really wanted something else, be prepared to get your wallet out. At this stage change is difficult, because the web site is a system of many interconnected elements. Change one, and you have to change them all.

It’s like seeing a house being built and then deciding you don’t like the shape of the kitchen or the location of the bathroom. You can’t change the architect’s plans when the house is half built.

Content strategy gets the plans accurate at the beginning. A content expert helps you to know what you really want and what will work; what content needs to be nailed down from the start and what can be changed easily later on.

Content is not the only element that requires careful planning – get things straight with the developer and designer too. But it is often the part that gets overlooked, leaving clients wanting to change it when it is too late. Talk to a content strategist at the beginning, and save yourself thousands of pounds of reworking later on.

Your eighth problem: you can’t offend your boss

It is often the boss who throws new ideas into the mix when it is too late to incorporate them. She may not be sensitive to the planning and building process so far – she might just be fixated on a particular concept or outcome.

She might suddenly want new sections of content or additional media, or something given priority on the front page to satisfy her ego or her latest creative idea. Whether or not these things are good ideas in themselves is less important than the negative impact on the development of the site – like wanting solar panels on the roof when the house has already been built to take electricity from the grid.

The problem here is that it takes a very brave employee to stand up to his boss and deny her right to play around with the web site even though it is already in production.

In our experience, it rarely happens.

Because you don’t say no to your boss. Especially if your boss is you.

A content strategist knows how web sites work and can stand up to your boss’s latest ideas for the sake of your business. He or she is a third party who helps you all to stick to the plan, as well as taking the better suggestions from your boss and converting them into features that will actually work.

Saving you money in the long run

At Endis Solutions we make web sites for small and medium sized businesses, and we see clients get into these difficulties time after time. Content strategy as a core part of your web site project holds it all together, keeps the site doing what you need it to do for your business, and prevents you from having to pay your way out of a mess later on.

That’s why content strategy is part of the basic web site package. You can’t afford not to have it.

Still suspicious? Why not get a free sample? Or get in touch to talk about what we could plan to build together.

So when someone offers you “content strategy” as part of a web site, you’re going to be suspicious, right?

Perhaps he tells you that if you don’t get help with your content right at the beginning, you’ll pay for it later. Perhaps he tells you a story about camels to back up his point.

Suspicious?

You should be. You should ask, quite bluntly, what problems does this content strategy solve for me? Seriously – what will actually go wrong if you don’t have it?

Here are the first four problems that content strategy overcomes. The next four are published here.

Your first problem: your content is not good enough

Content means the text, photos, videos, audio, forms and the like on your site. You’re a small business so you want to cut corners. That’s fine. But publishing copy that is full of mistakes, badly written, waffly or childish is not saving you money in the long term.

When your content is too long for the attention of users on the Internet, when it is repetitive, unclear, written in the wrong tone or inconsistently voiced – then you lose customers and undermine your brand by appearing cheap and unprofessional.

You wouldn’t write a magazine. Why do you think you can write a web site?

Your second problem: your existing print content does not work on the web

One way around the first problem is to reuse existing copy from your print media. You’ve got brochures and fliers – why not just put those words and pictures to work on the web site?

The answer is simple: the web is a completely different publishing environment to print. You’ll be pleased to know that people have studied how different they are. I’m not making this stuff up.

Your print copy will be too long. It will be written for a surveying and page-turning experience rather than a scrolling and clicking one. It will probably be too formal and it certainly won’t be written so that Google picks it up in search results. It will not have the essential pieces of information in the parts of the page where your visitors’ eyeballs go, nor will it have microcopy that represents it all around the web. It will assume that people will take time to read it, when online they won’t. And it won’t direct people towards their next action online.

In short, it will fail.

Print copy is a seven course dinner for guests only. Web content must be a space pill for anyone who drops by, or no one will swallow it.

Your third problem: it takes time to produce good content

It’s hard enough as a professional writer to meet deadlines, even with an editor’s reminders or a team to collaborate with. So what happens when your administrator, manager or trainee is suddenly expected to churn out quality writing in a short space of time?

She’ll freeze. He’ll stall. They’ll try to get someone else to do it or just keep putting it off. The project deadline will pass and they will eventually send incomplete or substandard work to your web team, and we’re back to problem one.

Only now it’s really late.

Good content is hard to write and it takes a lot of time. If you try to produce the content yourself because you want to save a bit of money, and then end up delaying the web site launch for months because you are strugging to produce it, then you are costing your business money by holding up the project.

Was this web site important to your business? Would you like it to be? Because expecting your staff to produce the content is like asking them to produce a TV show. It will take them ages to learn how it all works, never mind actually produce anything worth looking at.

Your fourth problem: there are bits of web content that you have never heard of

Who is going to write the metadata? The microcopy? The messages and labels? I’m not inventing these – metadata for example, is the information about the web page, such as the page title, page description, metatags and web address, some of it behind the scenes, all of it essential to the success of your content online. And all of it needing to be carefully written.

The visible words on the page are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to web content. But what is under the water is desperately important, in particular for online search. You need to get the metadata right to improve your site’s findability and usability.

The default, when you don’t get help with your content, is for the designer just to make something up. She may or may not be very good at it. Writing, editing and advising on content is not what she does. She may leave whole portions blank. Is that a risk that you want to take? – did you want a web site that does more than just look good?

If no one can find it or it’s confusing to use, then you’ve wasted the money you paid for it.

That’s only the half of it

In our business of making web sites, we see these four problems over and over again. You can’t afford not to have a professional help with your content. The content plan is the glue that holds the web site design together.

Content strategy is not about fleecing you at your point of uncertainty – it’s about saving you money in the long run, ensuring that the whole fee you pay for a web site is not wasted.

Basically, pay now or pay later. Just like the camel on Mount Sinai.

Next week we’ll look at four more problems that content strategy will solve for your business. Until then, why not grab a free sample of my work, or get in touch to explore how a focus on content now will bring returns for your company in the future?