Say you’ve been asked to buy a suit for someone you’ve never met. What do you do first?
- Buy the suit.
- 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.
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Whenever I start out on a new project, I aim to deliver demonstrably value back to the customer. I try to make an immediate change for better. After all, that’s what they pay me for. For content-oriented projects, a large part of that is knowing what information the customer thinks is important to them. Content modelling is key here.
If content has value, then take the necessary steps to manage it:
- Understand it.
- Define it.
- Measure it.
- Manage it.
Content modelling is a journey where those on the project strive to get consensus on ‘the what’ of information. The deliverable is a content model. However, the real value is in doing content modelling. Get a better understanding of what information you have and need, inspect and adapt it, define it in business terms and measure it in a way that your organisation can seek to continually improvement their business processes. Only then are you in a position to attempt to manage it.
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For any content managed web site, content types are its first class citizens. Content types describe the chunks of information that companies depend upon to conduct their business. Things like events, news, products, journals, flights, holidays, adverts, campaigns and call to actions. All possible content types. Yet, when talk to business folks about content types, 9 times out of 10, you may as well be speaking klingon. And right there is the communication gap. So is it any wonder, when you entrust third parties such as design agencies, solution providers, and vendors with the task of dissecting your business into manageable information chunks, that things don’t go according to plan.
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