All Content Strategy posts

How to blog consistently (note to self)

Happy new year everyone.

I have one goal for SmyWord this year: to blog more consistently.

Last year was great – launching SmyWord, having a couple of big content cheeses drop by in the comments, receiving positive feedback from customers. But if I could change one thing, I wished I had upheld my promise to post a new article once a week.

Increasingly businesses I do content work for want blogs on their web sites. A real, honest blog by someone who loves their work is a wondrous thing (especially if they’re not meta-careerists). And one of the fundamental pieces of advice I give them – one of the make-or-break keys to successful blogging – is to blog consistently.

5 ways to prevent the portfolio problem

I recently completed some work rebranding Endis, the sister company of the web business I work for. As well as specific sales and support web sites, Endis wanted an umbrella site for their UK brand. Simple, direct branding, with links off to the other sites (if you get geo-coded off to the US site, that was nothing to do with me. Just talking UK here).

Endis are a fantastic company with pedigree in web site development. Their unique and helpful platform works for both small and large organisations; commercial and charitable, as an off-the-shelf CMS and for fully customised sites.

Content strategy: as boring as it sounds?

The almost constant complaint from Content Strategists is that content is undervalued.
Many clients don’t seem to realise that once they have got something to offer, the first thing is to find a way to say it (how about on a web site, for example?). Instead, they want new web sites first and then they try [...]

How to create metaphors that enhance user experience

I’m working on content for an estate agent (that’s a realtor in the US). On their old site they have one of the worst metaphors that I’ve seen on a serious commercial web site. They have a basket.

That you can put houses in.

Think about that for a moment. As you browse through the site, looking for homes that fit your criteria, you can add ones that you like to a basket. Once they are in there, you click ‘View basket’ to see a list of homes you’ve chosen. There they are, snuggled at the bottom of the basket, waiting for you to – ‘click the register button to post off your details to the agent’. Whatever that means.

Generation Y and the Web: what’s the relationship?

What have Millennials, Job Snobs, Echo Boomers, the Net Generation, First Digitals, Peter Pan generation, and Trophy kids all got in common?

They are all names thrown at Generation Y. Although you can never actually define a generation – these things will always be gross generalisations – people talk about a generation born between the late 1970’s and the mid 1990’s. Let’s say 1979–1994.

From my basic, generalised grasp of what Generation Y is about, we’re talking:

Up, up and away

Welcome to SmyWord. Here we go.

First off I’ll put up some portfolio pieces and then I’m keen to get the conversation going. Balanced with the actual content work I do I’ll be able to post 1-2 times per week, on content strategy, writing for the web, grammar and style, communication, and a bit of psychology (because we’re humans writing for humans after all).

I’m keen to bring some energy to the dialogue about writing for the web. It seems that at last people are starting to take content seriously. They are realising that they can’t just throw in some words at the end of a project, or expect the developers or designers to do it for them.