#diwd Peace, Love and Content Strategy

By Dee-Ann LeBlanc (@deele) Dec 11, 2009 Comments

1 comment

If there's one thing near and dear to a writer's hard little heart, it's content. Unfortunately through much of the history of the web, content is always the last thing people worry about when building a site. Content Strategist Kristina Halvorson, CEO and Founder of BrainTraffic.com, aims to change all that.

An Apt Metaphor

Halvorson is a fan of the movie WALL-E. In part, she's a fan because to her this movie exemplifies the content problem as she sees it. Just as WALL-E lives in a world drowning in a mountain of junk, today she sees us drowning online in "mountains of useless crap."

As WALL-E takes pile after pile of junk, forms it into blocks and builds big tidy towers out of the refuse, she sees the CMS. In many cases, to her a CMS is our "tower of useless junk" where no one can find anything. Some might wince at that as maybe being a bit harsh, but I'm sure I'm not the only one who can immediately think of a number of large profile corporate sites that match this description.

Throughout the story, WALL-E sometimes finds something special. Something that delights, excites and engages him. Halvorson says that for us, these are the moments when we find a piece of content that's actually meaningful to us.

When WALL-E finds these exciting items, what does he want to do? He wants to share them, which is exactly the same impulse that drives us to share links and precious resources across social networking.

The Problem

We live in a world with an overwhelming amount of content that's building more and more of control, just like the one poor WALL-E was left to deal with. Every day, Halvorson points out, that content gets older.

She shared an email she received a week ago that exemplifies the problem. In it, a fan and reader states that while he enjoys what he does, it's always bothered him that designers and developers seem to avoid the issue of content all together. "Oh," he says, "just build a block for the content to go in and let the client worry about it."

The result? The content the client has, says the reader, is never as long or short as the designed blocks. Every single time he has to modify the design and code to address this, no matter how much he begs them to think more about it up front.

How Does This Happen?

A number of people tried to make sense of our digital mountains of useless crap. Richard Saul Wurman founded the concept of Information Architecture (not to mention the TED conference series). Edward Tufte champions the concept of beautiful designs that communicate information.

Both of these men empowered people before the advent of the web. Yet the web is a visual medium that needs machines to make it go, so corporations turned to developers and visual designers to lead the charge. When Jesse James Garrett wrote the User-Centered Design for the Web, people latched onto the word Time in his seminal Elements of User Experience diagram and took the representation as a process rather than the representation of layers it was meant to be.

Elements of User Experience, from Jesse James Garrett.

The reality that this situation creates is one that Halvorson is well familiar with. She started as a copy writer herself before becoming a web writer, and then evolving into the Content Strategist of today. Referencing an interactive media job roles diagram from Skillset.org, she discusses that in most situations many of these roles are filled by a single person juggling hats.