Maeve Catherine

The goal of content is to engage an audience whose needs match a business’ objectives. This ultimately relies on users easily finding and navigating through the content provided on a website. Content can include writing and visuals but on a deeper level content design is how all the content is prioritized and organized for the everyone’s benefit.

Content Design is one of the many disciplines that could be represented on a business’s content strategy team. When determining which disciplines should be represented on a project there are a list of considerations to go through. Meghan Casey explains, in her Content Strategy Toolkit, if the answers to these three questions are yes than there should be a content design team incorporated into a project:

1. Do you anticipate changing the way the website or a section of the website is organized?
2. Do you need to define content requirements to guide writers and subject matter experts in creating content?
3. Do you need to define taxonomies to relate content to other content?
   • Taxonomies are classifications of content that help a user get exacting what they are looking for.

Organization

In order to organize content content strategist must first learn about what content is most important to users. What topics do they look up to find your page? What topics should they look for? What topics do you want them to look for? What are keywords that should lead them to find your page? Each of these questions can help a business create a prioritization quadrant and user scenario tables.

Site Maps

Everything on a website should connect to somewhere because otherwise it will not be easily accessible. Site maps are a great way to visualize what content fits within a broader subject, which will ultimately become navigation tabs. As a content strategists you want to easily show a client how pages connect to one another in a simple way. Ashley Crutcher organizes her site maps by color association, which in my opinion is the easiest method for beginners. A tip for this method is to use simple, non repeating colors.

Don’t forget to account for the journey’s a user might take through your ecosystem. This can be done through user journey and pathway mapping. These strategies will ensure you create effective and informative pages in the next step.

Content Guides

If you need to define content requirements for users this is simply done through content modeling templates. This tool helps content be collaborated on easily from team member to team member. Megan Casey outlines the guidance she would provide authors who are creating content for a business in chapter 15. The three basic asks are: introduction copy, call to action, and an image. These asks are then organized by the content strategist who gives hands it off to the website developer.

Content Wireframes

Wireframes are basically a blueprint of what a website page should feature, specifically where the content will be placed. The Webflow Team explains “Wireframes allow designers to work out the basics of a page’s interface, such as space allocation, prioritization of content, functionalities, and behaviors”. The goal of wireframes are to help stakeholders visualize the bare bones of a page, there should be no images or final copy.

If you are not the best at sketching, there are a number of online wireframe tools that can help you digitally design your ideas. I have used and liked these three sites:

• Mockflow
• Adobe XD
• Lucidchart

Page Tables

Page tables should be content specifications for each section that was distiguished in a content wireframe.

Each page table should include:

• wireframe sketch
• page objectives
• content owner name
• page titles
• page content
  • Summary of the copy
  • Descriptions of Assets
• Extra notes
  • Implementation warnings
  • How often the page will need to be looked over.
  • Questions and risks to keep in mind during and after development.

Bring it together!

As you wrap up creating your page tables you should review the prioritization quadrant table for content you have not changed or deleted. Do not forget that creating content is never done, however completing the content design steps above sets up a business for success.