Planning for Content

Karen McGrane gave a ter­rific pre­sen­ta­tion on Con­tent Strat­egy, and what hap­pens when we re-design a site, and decide to go live with the exist­ing con­tent. Any­one inter­ested in pro­vid­ing their users with a good expe­ri­ence with their con­tent should absolutely watch this presentation.

Karen McGrane on Web Con­tent Strat­egy or “Avoid­ing the Eleventh hour Sh*tstorm Prob­lem” from UX Mel­bourne on Vimeo.

Here are some of my favorite take­aways from Karen’s talk:

• “We tell our­selves we don’t need good con­tent, we just need good templates.”
• “We don’t plan time to cre­ate and edit con­tent…“
  “Empha­size the real goal…better infor­ma­tion for site visitors.”
• “Do usabil­ity test­ing with con­tent providers…(not just end users).”
• “Chal­lenge the sched­ule: con­tent before design!”
• “Don’t just per­suade: start plan­ning, writ­ing, and editing.”
• “Peo­ple don’t go to your site to look at your tem­plates. They go for the content.”

When you think about it, we all pro­duce con­tent: on Twit­ter, our blogs, pod­casts, and other social media updates.  I would be inter­ested to dis­cuss how impor­tant it is to pro­duce a good con­tent expe­ri­ence per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally. This reminds me of the old say­ing, “If you don’t have any­thing nice to say, don’t say any­thing at all.”

What are your thoughts on plan­ning for  con­tent? How do you plan for con­tent on the sites, blogs, micro-blogs, pod­casts, etc. that you are producing?