Content Strategy

Content for a website is by far the single most important thing a website can have.  Sure a website can look great with its fancy graphics and beautiful navigation, but if the information is poorly written, does not have any useful information for the user, or is pretty much non-existent, the user will not hesitate to leave.

As web designers we need to be sure we are creating pages that our clients will be pleased with and that will keep users on the site, and create reasons for them to return.  Good content that is relative to your site is also good for SEO and helps create a guideline for the meta data.

I feel that content strategy is very important and should be taught to students a lot earlier than it is.  If we learn from the beginning how important content truly is for a site, we can start to grow and develop our creation of content that can help a site in it’s SEO abilities and so forth.  I believe that if we focus on content first, and decide what information is truly important, we can then develop a site around it.   But also be aware that content needs room to grow and develop as the site stays live.  Keeping these things in mind, I feel, will affect how individuals create and design their websites for their clients.

 

 

 

Comments:

Page one

dgrisier Your comment is awaiting moderation.
October 18th, 2011 at 3:39 am

When creating content for a page, do you have a set guideline for how long or short the content must be? I feel that the more simple you make the information, it could definitely create smaller bits of information that may make the page look empty?

Page Two
Darcy
Posted October 18, 2011 at 3:45 am | Permalink
Your comment is awaiting moderation.

I really liked your #6 point, of the equation to think of when creating content. “Social media = I hear you + I’m listening to you + I understand” For social media marketing, is there a limit to how many times you should tweet, or update a status, or anything to that nature? Is there a line that is either too much activity or not enough? The last thing I would like to do is to upset clients and irritate them to the point of ignoring any social media.
Page Three
dgrisier
Oct 18, 2011 @ 04:49:41

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

I really do enjoy the break down process you have created for content strategy they most definitely open up questions that you usually don’t think of when starting to create content. What do you think is the difference between creating content for a website vs. for social media? And how often do you feel the content should be updated or changed for users?

Resources for Potential site

Problem: Creating a recipe site for those on Dialysis

Davita.com

Features: Find a doctor, find a dialysis center, explanations of different types of treatments, forum, recipes.
Recipes sorted by: Appetizers and snacks, Breakfast and brunch, bread, Salads, Beef Lamb &Pork, Chicken and turkey, seafood, Pasta rice and grains, Pizza and sandwiches, soups and stews, sauces and seasonings, vegetables, beverages, deserts.

What I learned I might use in my site: Breaking up the recipes not only in meals, but also the type of food that it is. Also have a featured recipe spot.

How did the website solve the problem or manage the topic? The site not only gave users recipes they can use that are good to eat, but also educate them on dialysis and what exactly it means when their kidneys are not working.

Who was the website targeted to? This site is targeted to those who have kidney failure or those who are caring for those who have kidney failure. The target market also seems to be for those that are above the age of 30, as those on the slide show are above that age.

Ultracare-dialysis:
Features: Treatment options, what to expect, living well (eating well, exercising, mentally, sexually), caregivers
Recipes sorted by: Beverages, Bread/starches, condiments, deserts/snacks, fish, meats, pasta/rice, vegetables

What I learned I might use in my site: Possibly include an eating out link. Looking at meals at popular restaurants.

How did the website solve the problem or manage the topic? Like davita.com, this site educated users on what dialysis is. It also focuses on mental health of the patient and their caregivers.

Who was the website targeted to? Those on dialysis and caregivers.

http://www.livestrong.com/article/325536-diaic-diet-nutrition/

What I learned I might use in my site: Emphasize foods and seasonings to avoid.

How did the website solve the problem or manage the topic? It did not give specific food recipes, but it does explain importance of protein and certain things to avoid.

Who was the website targeted to? Those on dialysis and caregivers.

 

http://www.kidney.org/patients/kidneykitchen/dialysis.cfm

Recipes sorted by: Breakfasts, soups and salads, meat chicken and seafood, vegetables, breads, desserts

What I learned I might use in my site: nothing on the recipe site I have not seen on other pages.

How did the website solve the problem or manage the topic? Educated users and provided food ideas that are safe to eat.

Who was the website targeted to? Those on dialysis and caregivers.

Problem: Creating your own ecofriendly cleaning products

http://www.ecocycle.org

Features: ways to get your work or school to recycle, education on what is hazardous materials

Cleaning products sorted by: Laundry, household, pets, bathroom/kitchen cleaners, air fresheners, furniture, metal

What I learned I might use in my site: Sorting cleaners by type Explaining ingredients that are most used in other products

How did the website solve the problem or manage the topic? Gave recipes to use for cleaning. At home solutions.

Who was the website targeted to? Those who want to become more economically friendly

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Before the internet was up and running, the way of finding a service, was to look through the phone book. For those of you who have never encountered this “phone book” or don’t remember how it was used allow me to break it down for you. there were two types of phone books, the white book and yellow book. The white book held individuals where as the yellow book held information on businesses. If you wanted to find a plumber, you had to go to the “P” section of business and find “Plumbers” from there, plumber businesses were alphabetically listed. You would then select which ever was in your town, or showed up first.
In today’s world, a lot of people opt for search engines instead. The great thing about the internet is that customers can rate the company and share their experiences. You can also find a website for a company and check it out online before going through the hassle of calling them or physically going there. How these companys are found are through search engines. The most popular search engine is, of course, google.com. Other search engines such as bing.com, askjeeves.com, and a few others. When looking for something through a search engines the user types in something like “Plumber Dallas,TX”. What the user puts in is called keywords and these are very important.
A key word, as stated before, is the words a user puts in to search for websites. Those key words are important because that is what the search engine uses to look through a website. Through research I was able to find out where exactly the search engine looks on a website. The two main parts are in the Title, and Meta tags.
In the title, you would of course put the title of your page. Hopefully your title allows you to put some important keywords on it. In the meta tag, you can put descriptions of keywords of what you anticipate the users will use. SEO is a very important part to a website, as it determines whether or not an individual will be able to find your site through a search engine.

Search Engine Optimization
Meta tags
Title Tag

My comments on other blogs:

Blog one:
1 | dgrisier
October 13, 2011 at 3:20 am

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Why is it bad to only use keywords in meta tags? I would be under the impression that using only keywords would make it a little easier for the search engines to shuffle through what is written. Also, I read somewhere that meta tags had some variety to them, such as meta tag “robots” and such. Is this true, and if so are they useful? Thank you in advance for your insight.
Reply

Blog Two
dgrisier said:
October 13, 2011 at 6:30 am

This is a great article. Thank you for writing it. Are there any specific ways to better your chance of getting your site to show up on a search? How can you anticipate what keywords your clients will search? Thank you in advance.

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Blog Three

dgrisier says:
Your comment is awaiting moderation.
October 13, 2011 at 3:35 am

This is a really great way of explaining search engine optimization. I had read somewhere about black hat seo. What are your thoughts on this? And is there a way to anticipate what your target market will search for so that you put the appropriate keywords? Thank you for your time.
Reply

Frameworks

I am sure a lot of people wonder what is the point of a framework? How can you benefit so much from such a simple concept? After reading a few articles on the idea of frameworks, it seems like such a great way to organize things. It makes me wonder how people really work, in mass websites, without them.
First things first, what IS a framework?
To my understanding, a framework is just a way of storing sets of CSS files, which each accomplish one particular thing, to help the designer. For instance, one CSS file to reset the website, another CSS file for typography, and of course one for the layout of a site. Breaking up the site into portions to help making a designing of a page that much quicker and more efficient.
Sven Lennartz said a few of the negatives of this technique is having access code that you don’t need for every site. If you are making one basic CSS sheet for each topic (reset, typography, and layout) you may have extra code. One thing I would recommend is to use them to make things quicker, but not to “set it and forget it” with coding. To of course, over look the code and make sure you don’t have to remove anything you don’t need.
Another negative that Sven Lennartz listed was that it may take away uniqueness and creativity from a site. While that argument may hold water, I feel that it could actually allow someone to be more creative. I think that it may allow a designer to be more creative is because when you have a certain set of pre-made layout sheets, you know what is possible. You can take a pre-made layout, and tweak it to accomplish what you want. It will allow the designer more time to play with the design, than if they had to build it from scratch.
I think that frameworks are a great idea. Although, I feel that at this time in my learning, I would like to code everything until I know it like the back of my hand before I save off CSS sheets. I would worry that saving CSS sheets and just referencing them, as opposed to re-coding them for each site for the sake of practice, would make me forget the coding and not be as familiar with it.

http://www.graphicrating.com/2009/02/03/my-web-design-framework/
http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2007/09/21/css-frameworks-css-reset-design-from-scratch/
http://www.alistapart.com/articles/frameworksfordesigners

ICSS Final Project Idea

For my final project, I would like to help create a site that sells items, and the profits will go to help sustaining shelter for battered woman, and help provide counseling, and legal help for them.
The items my site will be selling are products such as hand bags, jewelry, and other feminine items. The target market for my site is for girls between the ages of 17-23. They are the largest spending market in America at the moment, and I feel that targeting them would be a great way to get money for a good cause. The girls can buy a cute bag at a good price, but also be benefiting and supporting women in having a healthy life.
I envision my site being partially specified for selling items, but also for advice, and information on how to help yourself or someone you know who is in an abusive relationship.

Responsive Web Design

Responsive web design is when a web designer, in a way, designs for every browser or viewing device out there. Some of the suggestions given to make a working site, that is friendly for every device out there, is to not give specific sizes in divs, but to give percentages. This is a way to make sure whether the screen is small, or large, that it will have the right appearance. There is also suggestions of making a more flexible layout, so that the pieces will flow together when the screen sign changes.
There are also ways to specify if a browser is small, use the smaller image version, but if it is a larger browser or device, then to use the larger image.
A lot of people take for granted the ability to browse on any device, that clients forget, or may not be aware, of the complications one can have when designing for all the viewers.
Designing for all the possible browsers is an important part as a web designer, but I am not looking forward to it.

http://coding.smashingmagazine.com/2011/01/12/guidelines-for-responsive-web-design/

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design

http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/understanding-the-elements-of-responsive-web-design/

History of Flash

Flash was created by Jonathan Gay and is currently one of the most popular media players for web browsers today. There are “rumors” that flash is going to be dead because iPad and iPods do not run flash on its web viewer. However, it is only a rumor and it is still a very important program that can give a great online experience.
Jonathan Gay started to program when he was in high school, starting with fun games which soon developed into creating programs. His first program was a graphic program called SuperPaint. Fast forward a few years, and he created a more advanced graphics program called IntelliDraw, which was to be the competitor of Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand. The advantage that IntelliDraw had over Illustrator or Aldus Freehand was that it allowed you to add in behaviors for the graphics.

The next program he created, which was called SmartSketch, which when using animation and java to create animations for the web. The program individually was not getting enough use or attention, in which he the idea to sell the program rights to Adobe. Flash became a part of Adobe in 1996. In which it evolved in 1996 to be called Macromedia Flash.

FlashMagazine

Progressive Enhancement vs. Graceful Degredtion

When creating a webpage, the designer can approach it in many ways. The two most popular ways are through progressive enhancement and graceful degradation. Both of these approaches are influenced through web browsers and how they display information and the the design.
With so many web browsers out there, and so many versions of them it can become quite a task to make a page that looks good and functions well on them.
Some designers approach a project by making sure the website works on all the browers, using the more outdated browsers as guidelines. They do not focus on the design of the page, but more of the content of the page. This approach is called Progressive Enhancement. The benefits of this approach is that older browsers and cell phones benefit from it. It is also a faster and less expensive approach than graceful degradation.
When using progressive enhancement, you plan out the content, and then the presentation, and finally the scripting of the page.

Other web designers plan on a page by using the most recent browsers as guidelines for how to create a page. They focus more on the design of the page, wanting to be able to use the bells and whistles that are out there even though not everyone can see and benefit from them. This approach is called graceful degradation. When using this approach, the designer must decide which design elements are the most important. When they decide what elements they MUST have, they then have to code those elements for each browser. An example of this is if they wanted to create a box shadow.

“Let’s start with a box-shadow for Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera:
.button {
-webkit-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #777; /* for Chrome + Safari */
-moz-box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #777; /* for Firefox */
box-shadow: 5px 5px 5px #777; /* for Opera 10.5, IE9
and future-proofing */
}
Now, let’s extend this with some CSS for IE specifically:
/* call this in IE only */
.button {
zoom: 1;
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(
color=’#777777′, Direction=135, Strength=5);
}” (http://jonraasch.com/blog/graceful-degradation-with-css3)

Some elements such as rounded corners or gradient colors will not work on older browsers. The rounded colors will become square and the gradient colors will become flat.

I personally feel that Progressive Enhancement is the best approach. This is because it relies more on what the webpage is about. Why is this page online, what information is it trying to send out to the users? I do not think a box shadow will influence users whether or not to purchase an item or believe the information on the page is true. Some do believe that these elements are extremely important and stick to the idea of graceful degradation.
To each their own on how they create a site, I believe I will use progressive enhancement, but who knows I may change.

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2010/08/a-complete-guide-to-progressive-enhancement/

http://jonraasch.com/blog/graceful-degradation-with-css3

Typography for the Web

As I stated in my previous entry, web design and designing for print are different playing fields,similar, yet very different. The best way I know how to explain it for those not involved in either field is to think of Cricket and Baseball. They both have the same basic layout, however the details are very different. Both use an object to hit a ball and run bases. However the object to hit the ball is different, the balls are different, and the fields are different, yet you can still use one to explain the other. Although web and print design look similar, they really are not.
Through my research I realized something that should have been obvious from the start, but fonts were not created for the screen. They are created for print, for newspapers and magazines. Most fonts are not created with the web in mind. An example one of my sources shows is when you put a layout that was printed on a poster, on the web, the font is harder to read. The reason for this is because the type is aliased. Here is an example of what this means..

In my research i found that there are various ways to make type more readable on the web. Some of these ways are to change the x-height to make the type more readable, to use fonts in the same family so that there isn’t a lot of contrast in the message or confusion.

Although print designing isn’t “easier” than web designing, print designers most defiantly have different challenges. Hopefully through some practice and more research, I can find type faces I enjoy using when designing pages and understand the relationships with typefaces and the messages they carry.

On Web Typography

Webfonts

Typography Books

Web Design

When designing a web page, one must be aware that there are many different browsers, technologies other than computers, and various qualities of screens that we use to look at the pages. Some believe that designing for the web is less stressful than for print, due to the fact that you can always make tweaks on the page if you notice something you would like to change. But in print, you are stuck. This argument was brought forward by Mark Boulton on his chapter of “Designing for the Web” While he makes a valid point I have to argue why would you want to continually edit something while it is viewable to the public? If I was a user and went to a page where I would go to visit it 10 minutes later and it has some changes, I would become frustrated if this continually happened.
I also think designing for the web would be more difficult than designing for print. When you design, say a magazine cover, you know the dimensions you need, who your target audience audience is, and once you have finished designing it, you can sleep peacefully knowing that everyone will see your design the same way and the way it was intended. As I mentioned before, with the different browsers and technologies accessing the page, Web Designers don’t have the same luxury as those designing for print.
There is a post by Nicholas Holland which is an extreme example of how people believe web designing works. They view it as a simple way to take away or add features without it affecting the rest of the web. Although adding or taking away features may not be easy, designers can create pages that adapt to the user.
Ethan Marcotte explains how designers can design a page that adapts depending on the user. An example he gives is how architects now are able to create homes that change depending on how many people are in a room affecting the temperature and how see through the glass is. I think that this is a great article explaining how we do not have to stress over creating a new “home” for every browser or technology that is used. We can create one “home” and make it so its features will adapt to the different browsers or technologies being used. This truly makes the most sense.
I know that I am new to web designing and coding, so my opinion may change in the future, however regardless if it does or not, these articles were very informative and I hope to keep these ideas and thought in the back of my head.