I spend a decent amount of time explaining to people in the web industry when they need content strategy. [Answer: on every project, of course.]
And so I thought I’d put together a few situations that arise in real life….those times when you really need your friendly neighborhood content strategist on speed dial. Here’s the first:
You’re trying to unwind your hacked-together “content management system” and implement a real CMS. Sure, you started off with good intentions. Your site structure made a lot of sense when you first built it….a few years ago. And ever since then, when you’ve added something new, you discovered the content system/blog software/hacked-together pieces-parts can’t quite handle it….so you’ve just added on some new software or technology or something to make it work. Perhaps your site itself actually looks good. But it’s gotten to the point where you’re terrified to even look at the site, because you know you can’t hack anything else onto it, and simple text changes eat up your day.
First, if you’re in this situation, you’re not alone. Many, many other organizations’ websites suffer from the same problem. But if you’re ready to figure out how to make content maintenance easier, get a content strategist to help.
What a content strategist can do for you:
- Audit your content to figure out what you have
- Determine the types of content you have
- Determine the kind of information [metadata] you need to have for each content type
- Recommend how to use this info to set up a system that will make your content work for you
- Craft or improve a content workflow that fits your organization
- Help you find and migrate to a tool that makes all this possible and automates manual tasks