Two marketing views of your website

Where do you think your website sits on the Web?

The folks over at Hubspot and have been quite vocal when advocating the benefits of inbound marketing over outbound marketing. They are not alone. Real-world marketing experiences reported by the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) demonstrate how companies that have embraced inbound marketing are enjoying greater digital successes with less investment. The CMI have also highlighted how marketing failures are being made by those organisations that do not understand the new conversation rules and/or the lay of the “social” land. But why?

Continue reading

Posted in marketing | Leave a comment

Web Standard Template

A Web Standard is both a guide and a measure. I believe that Web Teams that invest enough time and the enough effort into Web Standards, will reap the benefits. We covered this in a previous post. Today, we dive straight in with a concrete example: URL Naming Web Standard. Note, just to keep this post to a reasonable length, I’ve had to trim it down. Rest assured it does have enough meat in there to illustrate what is a Web Standard.

Continue reading

Posted in standards | Leave a comment

Web Standards

northern lightsNot many web sites today are launched with clearly defined and/or enforceable Web Standards. For larger organisations, looking to execute efficiently on the Web, this is a major stumbling block.

Confession. Having worked in and for large organisations for over 25 years, I was never a Web Standards fan boy. They were always out-of-date. They were written by non-practitioners. Their format was dry and verbose. Their purpose unclear but just obey. Effecting change or providing feedback was actively discouraged.  In short, information flowed one way: down! There was not much to like about Web Standards.

However, if you can get past all, there were little gems of insight locked away in these Web Standards. Looking back through older eyes I realise that I never really hated Web Standards. I just didn’t like the way they were enforced. So I rejected them and promptly falling foul of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Continue reading

Posted in standards | 1 Comment

Fix WCM? But what’s broken?

I’ve been delivering web content management solutions for a while now and like a lot of folks out there I still find it extremely challenging. It’s never a walk in the park. No two are the same. And the results lie between the two extremes of weird and wonderful. The bigger the customer, the more intriguing the experience. Customers definitely come with baggage, others with wild expectations. So when a couple weeks back, at the Janus Boye Conference Jon Marks crowd sourced opinions using the twitter hashtag fixwcm on the “How to Fix WCM” track I followed with keen interest. Firstly because I didn’t think for one moment that WCM was broken. And secondly, I thought it was just a distraction from the underlying fact that we are broken!

Continue reading

Posted in cms | Leave a comment

Crossing the Great Content Model Divide

What happens today?

Delivering and maintaining large web sites is hard. It requires the business team to communicate what they want and for the technology team to deliver what they need. The two groups are known for not getting on. For a web project to succeed, they must eat from the same table, talk the same language and reach consensus. Communication is the key differentiator between success and failure here. It’s essential that when someone in the business says product that a developer not only understands what a product is but can implement it. Now, business and technology folks don’t share the same view of the world (which is a plus). However, not enough effort is invested to align these two views during the project(which is a minus). Think about it. The business is entrusting their most valuable assets, their content, to software developers that may or may not get it! We don’t have to live with great content divide.

contentdivide1

What can be done?

I’ve found the best way for the business and technology teams to reach a common understanding of the subject matter is for them to collaborate on a shared view of the business domain. Have meetings, discuss stuff, card sort, write documents, role play, build prototypes, and so on. All important stuff. Keep doing that. But there needs to be something that captures the single source of truth that is a shared and mutually agreed upon representation of the business. The essential communication link between the business and technology team. That something is the content model.

contentdivide2

How can we get better?

I’ve already spoken about content modelling and your essential first steps. I won’t go over that again. If you takeaway anything from this post, takeaway this.

Every CMS product implements its own content model that its developers understand. On your web sites, Your developers are translating your requirements into this content model, and rightly or wrongly, filling in your missing gaps.

Are you happy to hand over your business decisions around your content to them? How do you know if they have got it right? How do you know if its wrong? We all know the cost of fixing problems is prohibitively more expensive downstream. A short conversation upstream could have completely avoided the creation of major problems that tend to arise downstream.

 

evolving_contentmodel

 

Parking the details for now, the content model needs to be started upstream (analysis phase) and extend into downstream (development and testing phases) activities. The content model empowers the business, provides a common vocabulary for your content, and hooks in a number of downstream folks with a vested interest in managing your content going forwards. Maybe then we can start crossing the great content model divide.

 

 

Posted in content modelling | Leave a comment

Content First

big-guySay you’ve been asked to buy a suit for someone you’ve never met. What do you do first?

  1. Buy the suit.
  2. Meet & Measure them.

For design-led projects, we’re buying that suit first. By damn, one way or another that content will well fit into that design and look good! Of course I’m exaggerating a little here. But if have been in a project where the content is delivered at the end and simply doesn’t fit, you never want to go there again.

Now call me odd, but wouldn’t life be that little bit easier if we sized up the content first and then designed the site to fit it. Measure, then fit. I dream of projects where we all work together to determine what information a site needs upfront, organise it, think of ways to be navigate it and then and only then do we create the designs to satisfy those requirements. What typically happens is something that lies between these to extremes depending on when I get involved.

Continue reading

Posted in content strategy | Leave a comment

Book Review: Letting Go of the Words

Summary

Letting Go of the Words is an example-driven tour on how to write content for the web. It’s 350 pages are full of clear, before and after examples, of good and bad web pages. In less than a day, Janice (Ginny) Redish will transform the way you write for the web. Ginny is clearly an accomplished author. During the day, she helps people create usable and useful web sites. This book is more of a handbook, jammed packed with great tips and explanations of why stuff works and other stuff doesn’t. What Ginny manages to do is communicate practical web writing guidelines to experienced web readers like us.

Continue reading

Posted in content strategy | Leave a comment

From Web Sites to Digital Solutions

Web sites are easy

When I start a new project, particularly with a new customer, I pay close attention to how they use the term web site. Customers arrive wanting a web site. They walk out with a digital solution. The web site is the easy bit. The hard part is defining, creating and rolling out a digital solution specifically for them.

marauders-mapSo what is a digital solution? For me, its a dynamic map that continually adapts as you journey through a project. A bit like Harry Potter’s Marauders Map. Sometimes it actually feels like we’re using the map to guide our customers through the project pitfalls but without the protection of the invisibility cloak. So to be clear, a digital solution takes a customer from what they want to what they need. And for me, this is the key differentiators between happy and unhappy customers.

Continue reading

Posted in cms, content platforms | Leave a comment

The Information Architect and The Developer

About 10 years ago I was brought into a digital agency, with a burgeoning technology arm, to help them get better at delivering websites. At first, I was sat with the web developers, but over time my audience widened to include both Information Architects and Designers. That’s when the sparks started to fly and I was plunged head first into the world of mutual disrespect between all parties.

Things have moved on (a little) since then but I would like to share some of things I learnt back then, and mix that in with what I still see today. If you have any thoughts in and around this area, I would love to hear them. Be sure to let me know from which vantage point you’re coming from when commenting though… 🙂

Continue reading

Posted in content architecture, content strategy | 2 Comments

Delivering Content is Hard – Where’s my Content Strategy?

There are projects, and then there are content management projects. The latter are the ones that keep me awake at night. The challenges seem to have no bounds. There don’t seem to be any knowledge ceilings in sight. You are constantly learning (which is good), sharpening your tools and/or adding new ones to your content toolbox to successfully deliver these kinds of projects. So why are content management projects so damned hard then?

Now I agree with the folks back at CMS Myth when they say:

“CMS is a technology, while content management is a discipline.”

Continue reading

Posted in cms, content strategy | Leave a comment