If you have a website, Content Strategy is important to you – even if you’ve never heard of it. It’s about governance. What is the purpose of your site, and what part does (or can) your content play in getting there?
If you’re dealing with a simple website, for example a blog or a personal site, your content strategy can be equally simple. For this blog, I didn’t even write it down – but I did consider a variety of things, including:
- is a blog the appropriate type of site?
- topics to be included
- writing style to use
- resources (is it just going to be me? If so, how much time am I going to spend on it?)
- intent (is it to sell? To drive traffic to my business? An online diary?)
- do I care about monetization?
- comment settings
- look and feel
- architecture
- publicity strategy (how am I going to advertise that this site exists?), and
- a bunch of other things.
I’m currently putting together a similar strategy as part of a contract for a major University. Their web presence is a good deal larger (32 000 pages according to Google Analytics), and involves considerable complexity. The strategy for them needs to account for this complexity – but essentially covers much the same points mentioned above.
So, why do I do these things? Why is it necessary?
Sure, it’s a stimulating intellectual excercise trying to squeeze all that complexity into your head, but there’s a much better reason than that. Simply put, your content strategy is the foundation upon which the future of your website depends.
It’s the coherent, consistent understanding of your website content, and what possibilities might be.
If you understand what your site’s key goals are, and how your content must be created, updated and guided to achieve those goals, then everything else should neatly fall into place.
If you don’t have a coherent, consistent understanding of your website, the website itself is likely to reflect that. It’ll be disorganised. It’ll lack focus. You won’t know from one day to the next what you ‘re doing with it.
We’ve all seen sites like this. Small business sites that have been created because the boss knows that a business must have a site these days – but that’s all. But if that business understood the possibilities, and had the appropriate content strategy in place to achieve those possibilities, who knows where it might lead?
