Creating a content strategy for your website

— Published December 1st, 2003  |  by David Moore

It's unfortunate that the software applications we use to look at websites are called 'browsers', because only web professionals actually browse sites. Everyone else comes with a specific goal in mind: 'Can I book a training place?' 'Do you have have this product, and should I buy it from you?'.

People are looking for content to help them reach their goals, and you should start any site redevelopment by drawing up a content strategy designed to satisfy the user. We're currently doing this for a couple of our clients, and working through it ourselves now we've finally found the time to revamp our own presence (the cobbler's children and all that).

These are the steps we follow:

Describe the problem

Many development groups are never clear on what aspect of the site the work is trying to improve. IT people imagine themselves solving a technology problem ('make the site easier to update and quicker to download') while marketing people might think it's a branding problem. An excellent place to start is getting consensus on what the problem is and what a good solution would do.

Audit of existing site

This helps to establish the strengths and weaknesses of the current site, and provides prioritised recommendations for future work.

Benchmarking/Competitive analysis

What are your rivals or comparable organisations doing? Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, of course, but you might also be able to exploit their weaknesses.

Defining internal objectives

What is your site for? It may sound obvious, but often the original plan for the site has been forgotten, and nobody is now clear what it's supposed to be doing. Internal objectives should be related to broader corporate strategy - generate sales leads, reduce customer service costs, or support investors, for example.

Defining your users

Who do you want to come the site and what are they looking for? This is the most crucial part of the development process, and repays real research, rather than just guesswork. Gather as much information as you can about your users (from traffic figures, feedback, market research, and if possible interviews), and then try to group different users with similar behaviour. How often do they come to the site? How much do they know or trust the organisation? Are they looking for information or to perform a transaction?

From here, you should develop composite personas that represent the most important users as individuals, fleshing out details about them. This allows everyone to be clear who the site is being designed for.

Establishing requirements

From the internal objectives and user research, you can draw up a list of site requirements. What does it need to have, do or be to meet internal needs and those of your audiences? Assigning priorities to these can help in creating a phased development program.

In a large organisation, involving contributors, partners and other stakeholders in these stages is vital. This work forms the basis of a good content strategy, which should drive the development of a successful site. In a future article, we'll outline how you get from a good strategy to a good implementation.