Establishing a content view of your website

I’m currently working on a project that is very information-centric and therefore text-heavy so it’s vital to present this in a consistent and engaging manner. The information architecture (IA) work has been chunked into four phases with the intention of redesigning the website from a “content out” point of view—one that I consider essential for a very information-centric, text-heavy website.

1. The content view (this post)
2. The site view
3. The page view
4. The user view

Content view

In developing a content view, we’ve produced a Content Outline for the existing site structure and highlighted the need for the client to audit existing content in order to identify what needs to be kept, modified, removed or created. This view is important to establish as existing content may be part of the problem we will solve with the redesign. We want to remove unnecessary content, minimise the less important and maximise content and messaging that meets brand and business needs as well as our users’ goals. As this audit progresses (this is a concurrent and ongoing work package for us), the content begins to organise itself into natural groupings. This activity is also the perfect opportunity to organise the content for physical delivery.

The Content Delivery Plan is the key deliverable of our content view and is provided as an Excel workbook. Services have been mapped to industry-standard categories, given an arbitrary index number and additional columns to record additional data:

• Content title (in plain-English);
• Page type;
• Template;
• Production tracking.

So, what goes into a content template?

All of this knowledge—the content the client wants to share—is in the heads of hundreds of local experts within the organisation and naturally not all of them have the time or inclination to write fantastic web copy. By adopting content templates, the existing copy that we’re going to keep—running to many hundreds of pages—can be reviewed and standardised. Before we create these content templates though, it helps to know what content we need to create and understand what each page is supposed to do. Pushed for time (as ever), the content audit is running alongside other information architecture activities. I don’t believe this is a risk as we have more than enough mandatory or statutory content items to be getting on with and the thing about developing a site structure is making sure it can grow when new content arrives. Knowing that it will grow very soon isn’t a bad position to be in early on in the planning.

From  experience I’m anticipating a need for at least four page types:

• author-generated content (popularly referred to as “static” content);
• auto-generated (dynamic) content collating lists of similar content;
• a “signpost” to an external website or web application;
• a hybrid “landing page” that introduces a section of the website with an authored introduction and some auto-generated lists of relevant page links.

I’m sure that as we look at the content in detail, we’ll identify further types, especially around the author-generated content.  The content template also records the following about a piece of content:

1. The page title.
2. An introduction.
3. The main copy.
4. For each page indicate seasonality / datetime relevance.
5. For each page provide geo data if applicable.
6. For each page indicate what else a visitor can do on the page – watch a video, view a photo gallery, download a file, order or pay for something, go read more content or visit another website or web application.
7. For each page collate other useful administrative and descriptive metadata (using a controlled list or otherwise).

Update (3 Feb 2011): Leon Paternoster has a good article on point 2: In praise of standfirsts.

If you don’t yet have a Style Guide for your website, record any decisions about how you write your content—tone, length, style etc in a simple document as you go along. Yahoo! have published their style guide and I have a few more links in my Delicious bookmarks account if you need further pointers. Happily, our client does have a Style Guide so it will be a content management task of ensuring web authors follow it.

The content templates not only help the content authors and managers but they’ll also inform our work in developing the wireframes because you can’t really design and build a page without knowing what needs to be on it.

Thanks for getting this far! if you can suffer my writing “style” tune in next week when I’ll detail our site view and how we designed the new site structure. Subscribing to the RSS feed is the cheese-easy way to get informed.

Further reading

Erin Kissane goes into far more detail on the important role content templates play in web design in her excellent article Content templates to the rescue.