Content Strategy
Organizing information on your site helps users quickly and efficiently find information about your unit and its offerings.
Content strategy helps you structure the information on your site in a coherent and easily navigable manner. Having a thorough content strategy plan helps you know how the pages on your site relate to one another. It also helps you understand what content should be on each page.
Pieces of content strategy include identifying and documenting your primary audiences and the goals your have for those audiences on your site. Knowing this high-level information helps you then decide which pages you need on your site.
The abstractness of content strategy work can be confusing at first for those unfamiliar with the discipline. It is a sub-skillset of writing. Due to the size and scope of many sites, it is an important skillset to leverage in order to have a well organized website.
Our workshop series for content maintainers can help you better understand the power of content strategy and how to leverage it when working on your website.
Tips for Content Planning
If you make content simple, skimmable and engaging, people are more likely to read it. Here are a few best practices for planning a successful webpage.
- Set goals for your content
- If you can’t explain whom this page serves — and why — it shouldn’t exist
- Goals keep creators honest, and they help prioritize what gets made
- Frontload the page
- Your most important and broadly relevant content should come first
- Put less pertinent content lower down
- Frontload your content
- Place key words or phrases early in headings, subheadings and paragraphs
- Write imperative (“Do this”) and declarative (“The sky is blue”) sentences
- Trust your users
- If they’re looking for something important, they will keep clicking…
- …provided your website’s structure and content are intuitive
- Draw the page on paper
- Sketch out its shape and all the content it requires
- Quickest way to identify layout problems, spare parts, missing pieces
- Helps with nonlinear content design for marketing pages
- Ask real users what they think
- If you can’t find a user in the wild, try a coworker
- Every ncsu.edu page undergoes team review
- Create a governance document
- Update your content on a rolling schedule — especially facts, figures, rankings
- Search engines prefer fresher pages