content first!
DESCRIPTION
Building a great site takes expert design, development, QA, project management and many other skills. But without content, a site has no reason to exist in the first place. So it's surprising that content often takes a backseat to wireframing, design comps, site building, and theming. If you've ever demo'd a site that had your beautiful responsive theme wrapped around dozens of pages of "lorem ipsum" then you've experienced this problem first-hand. Building a site "content first" means investing the effort up front to develop key messaging, positioning, and value propositions ... to craft the story of the brand and use this as the basis for creating your wireframes, information architecture, and designs. It puts the site's "reason for being" at the forefront, ensuring that all the effort from the design and development teams is as effective as possible. Presentation Includes: What is Content First design and how will it benefit your organization or client? What are the key steps to take BEFORE you make the first wireframe or comp? Defining "content" - from messaging to multimedia, it's more than just "words"! How does content drive design and development and make them more effective? How should agencies bill (and clients budget) for these efforts, and why should they?TRANSCRIPT
content first!
L7 CREATIVE
*planning your site from the inside out
what is a content strategy, and why do you need one?
because you don’t want to launch this site
let’s grab some sushi
a beautiful restaurant with mediocre food? or...the unknown “hole-in-the-wall” spot that serves the best sushi in town?
where would yourather eat:
in other words:presentation is important, but it means nothing without great content
more reasons
brandingtrustcommunityconversionsseo
what makes up a content strategy?
audiencemessagepositioningdifferentiation
gather / auditorganizeestablish IA / hierarchycreate
strategy execution
the audience
who do you want to bring to your site?what are they interested in?who else do they follow?what keywords do they search on?
the positioning
how does your product/service relate to the marketplace?who do you compete with?what existing products are you like?what existing products are you not like?
the message
what is special about you?what is your “style” of communication?formal? informal? hip? conservative?
differentiation
what is remarkable about you?
what do you have to say that is interesting and share-able?
steps in creating your content
strategy
start from a goal
example conversion events:a salea newsletter signupa leadtime on sitepage views
start from a goal
what gets measured, gets managed
gather / audit
what do we have?is it good?does it match the strategy?will people share it?
organize
by content categoryby content typeby user story or audience
establish IA / hierarchy
site mapcontent typestaxonomycontextviewsurl pathskeywordsbreadcrumbs
create
industry articles
expert content / positioning
solve problems for your target audience
create
get out the whiteboard – what will we be sharing on this site?newsblogsimagesvideostructured content
who do you need?
your content team
writers and/or editorsseosite builder / administratorsocial media
metrics for success
define clear metricsbenchmarka/b test content and navigationiterate just as you would with code!
thank you!
L7 CREATIVE
Harley OrionExec Producer + PrincipalL7 Creative
www.l7creative.com@l7creative