Interview with Sue Davis, tutor of Content Strategy for the Web

How would you define web content strategy?

The entire editorial content development process for a website.

This sounds huge, what are the primary elements of a good content strategy?

It can be broken down to setting up a good process for creating, publishing, sharing and governing content. In other words dealing with the whole content life-cycle from creation to deletion.

It tries to grapple with the messier questions about web content: Why? How? For whom? When? Where? How often and What now?

It considers strategies and tactics to deal with: audience research, business needs, publishing workflow, SEO, meta-data, findability, repurposing and reusing content and redistribution (for example via social media).

Why would an organisation want a content strategy?

Seeing website content as a business asset rather than a ‘lorem ipsum’ afterthought is a powerful thing that can improve the bottom line.

There should be no guessing about what your audience needs and therefore no wasted energy commissioning content nobody needs. Only content that meets a business goal and real need would be present.

Getting content under control can enable you to prioritise that which is important for you and your readers. Often irrelevant content will crowd out the good stuff.

Ultimately organisations will then only show useful, usable, up to date and profitable content on their website rather than content which is useless, unusable or out of date.

How did you become a content strategist?

I started off as a graphic designer interested in structuring and grouping information visually, then I became an information scientist (actually an academic librarian), again thinking about structuring, but this time at a meta-data level – how my students could best make use of my library’s resources. I showed students how to search quite complex online databases (pre-user-friendly web).

Whilst a web producer for Channel 4 – over a decade ago – I started to question their approach to web content, which was basically shovelling their print leaflet content online. I asked questions about how web content could be different and then ran an in-house course about writing content for the web. But all the time I was thinking ‘this is not enough’. It is not enough to think just at the page level. My work took me into thinking at the big picture level.

Now I work at the content interface between the client and the developer. For example I’m currently briefing techies who are creating a mobile version of a client’s site. This won’t just be a smaller version of their website, but will show content in a way that is helpful to those on the move. Mobile readers may want to see different content or the content in a different order than the website audience will.

When I produce a site I’ll reshape the content I’m given to work for the web. When I hand websites over to clients I’ll provide guidance on content strategy fundamentals: web style, governance, workflow, maintenance, social media and SEO.

Why did you want to start this course?

Sometimes the web writers and marketers I trained at The Publishing Training Centre were frustrated with the boxes they were given to write their text in, the structure of their sites or how they fit into the content creation workflow. They weren’t able to write content that really ‘belonged’ and ‘flowed’ as someone else had made decisions about the structure and the tools they use every day without involving them. They were often left to grapple with a CMS (Content Management System) that wouldn’t do what their editorial ideas needed it to do or that couldn’t cope with the demands of SEO or social media sharing. And thus they ended up with pages that were out of date or performed poorly on Google – which were hard to fix at the page level.

Often Nancy Duin (one of my co-tutors on the Writing and Editing for the Web course) and I would critique parts of delegates’ sites that had major content problems, but nobody at their organisation had responsibility for the problems we found. In fact some problems we found years ago have still not been fixed! These were usually problems to do with organisational silos, governance and workflow.

I wanted to give more ambitious editors and writers the tools and know-how to be able to challenge those bad decisions – or abdication of responsibility – so they can change their sites for the better.

Why should someone sign up for your course now?

• To become more than a web editor: to take control
• For their career
• To improve the bottom line for their organisation.

What are the top three things delegates will take way from your course?

• Familiarity with the tools, processes and best practice so you can plan content to fulfil your organisation’s goals
• How to delegate content creation with confidence
• And possibly the most important: ways to sell content strategy to your boss without selling content strategy!

Where is content strategy going?

1. Web governance. Big messy organisations need people with website responsibility who are high enough in the organisation chart to have the power to make decisions that may affect the organisation of the company, not just their website.
2. The emerging ‘responsive design’ movement will need people who aren’t designers or coders, but are content people.
3. CMS usability. This is a big one. One of the things holding back good web content is the tools that individual writers and editors have to use every day. CMSs are improving – for small to medium sites we now have the excellent WordPress – but we still have a long way to go to make large-scale CMSs usable and useful. Shovelling and creating require different tools. Writers and editors have their part to play in pressurising their organisations to give them usable tools.

The Content Strategy for the Web course will be running on 1 November 2011 and 22 May & 27 November 2012 at The Publishing Training Centre in London.