Your website content strategy: two key take-outs
Content engineering’, ‘experience design’, ‘structured content’ - the world of content strategy can be quite intimidating at first, with all its new terminology and concepts. Pre-empting this fear of the unknown, our coach Sue Davis made us realise something very important right at the beginning of the course: We are all doing content strategy already!
Be it in the form of editorial calendars, in-house style guides or user surveys – each of us have elements of a content strategy in place.
Building on these experiences, Sue took us through the four building blogs of the ‘content strategy quad’. Each lesson was supplemented with a practical exercise, either based on our own professional challenges, or a project Sue had previously worked on.
For me, the course managed to weave a loose collection of inklings, vague ideas and hearsay into a safety net I can fall back onto when I get distracted by everyday problems. It also gave me tone of inspiration, and two major takeaways: on these experiences, Sue took us through the four building blogs of the ‘content strategy quad’. Each lesson was supplemented with a practical exercise, either based on our own professional challenges, or a project Sue had previously worked on. Armed with the content strategist’s favourite tool – sticky notes – we had a go at some pressing questions: How can a content management system help enforce our content strategy? How do we tackle those pain points in our content creation workflow? I still have that pile of yellow post-its on my desk, together with some of the great literature Sue recommended.
- Stay focused! The only content strategy you need is the one that helps you achieve your goals.
- Don’t wait for the finished product. Make a change today, learn from it, and build your strategy as you go along.
A big thank you to Sue for a fantastic day of learning and sharing!
Julia Heitmann, Communications Officer at UAS, attended Content Strategy for the Web in October 2018. Find out more about the latest virtual version of Content Strategy for the Web.
Connect with Julia on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-heitmann-8bbb3454/