Where to begin with a seemingly overwhelming task of making a complex content structure simple for user? It starts with Uninformed Optimism. Diving into a current experience, auditing how thing are currently presented to the user, looking at competitors. Then we move into Informed Contemplation. This is when we move on to understanding and defining the audience. This gives us a whole new set of inspirations and inputs. Finally we move to Informed Guidance. This is where we start making clear recommendations around structure, taxonomy, voice & tone, and finally content modeling that informs not only UX decisions but also CMS setup. How do we ensure that future Author’s understand the Content Strategy? And how do we bridge Content Strategy and the authoring experience in a CMS?
It’s easy to go all the way through a project and forget why certain decisions were made. We’ve developed tools to use these decisions as a framework for the whole project. We also create documentation that is somewhere in between a content strategy and CMS training document. This helps bridge the gap between early decisions that we made and content creators that may come on later in the project or indeed later in the website’s lifecycle.