Tangled Vines: Does Your Web Content Feel Like This To You?

In her wonderful book, Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson’s first contention in the pursuit of better interactive content and better decision-making about online content is to ascertain what content you already have, to adopt a clear strategy about how to evaluate the content, and to get serious about clearing out the “dead wood” in the content you’ve already published. I’ve been saying this for years. Content must come first because your site only serves two purposes – put quite succinctly by Halvorson on page 6:

Generally speaking, your web content is useless unless it does one or both of the following:

• Supports a key business objective.
• Supports a user (or customer) in completing a task.

This is a mandate that not only content strategists and interactive copywriters should follow, but interactive designers as well. Web designers consistently make the fatal error of designing sites that brand or re-brand an interactive presence visually without clearly understanding or incorporating the core needs of the client. As a result, the client is often stuck with interactive designs that are not scalable, hold key elements of the client’s information stream invisible, or require elaborate and/or costly redesign and redevelopment to meet the future needs of the client.