Build A Relevant & Intriguing Website by Creating Strategic Content

Content is a vital part of a highly interactive experience to be found on a website. Often you do not realize this while going for a website design but of late content has played the most important role in solving various website related issues such as,

• Projects that are delayed
• Designs appearing in a broken form
• Voices that go unheard by the visitors
• Landing pages which perform low on the search engines
• Dead links to the social media channels
• Online customer service calls not up to the mark

Strategic Content Planning

In order to get optimum results, it is very important to frame a content strategy that ideally follows three very important stages of analysis, editorial and architecture.

Analysis

Here the content is analyzed based on two crucial activities such as content audit and then context analysis. Analysis is taking a magnifying glass to your content situation. These two activities comprise of the overall content analysis.

Content Audit

In this particular activity, the content which exists is reviewed. Towards the end of the audit you will be able to give answers to several questions such as:

• Type of content
• Format of the content
• Topics that are in place to develop content
• Content quality
• Structure of the content
• Presence of redundancies, overlaps and gaps in the content

Context Analysis

This particular activity deals with the components or elements that are present around the content and which have an impact on the content in various ways. Such an activity involves giving answers to processes, users and goals.

Goal

• What exactly is the organizational goal and why is it important?
• In what ways will the content be able to help you achieve your targets?

Users/Audience

• What audiences are you aiming for and why?
• Are the users searching for your content through mobiles, social networks or website?
• How is your existing website content performing in terms of interactive experience?

Processes/Ecosystem

• In what ways do you govern, maintain or create content?
• How will the future planning of the content shape, once it is launched?
• What is the buzz among your competitors relating to your content?

Editorial

This activity deals with the framing of the content from the user’s perspective. Herein you can determine:

• The voice or style that would entice the users
• Themes or topics of user interest being covered
• The criteria or standards that you follow for making the content credible enough

Architecture

It deals with deciding on content from the technical perspective wherein re-purposing, structuring and organizing the content are the primary motives. The planning starts from a simple site map. Then the metadata of the website is finalized using various taxonomies and models. In a nutshell, you govern your content management system as well as the devices, OSes and browsers in order to make them interpret how to display your content and exactly where to showcase.

How These Activities Work in a Collaborative Fashion?

After having a pretty good understanding of each and every area of a strategic content cycle, let us know how all the areas work together.

• The three major areas of Analysis, Editorial and Architecture should be executed in a sequential manner especially keeping architectural stage for the last. This is due to the fact that time and resources do not get wasted in constructing sections of a site which are of no use. Unnecessary content stuffing could be avoided to fill the screen space. The house can only look beautiful if it has the appropriate number of relevant rooms rather than being full of rooms. So first planning should be done before actually constructing the content.
• Once the content is planned and constructed as per the above stages, an ongoing analysis should be carried out after it is actually made live or launched. This is because the performance of the content varies from time to time due to the changing preferences and behavior of the users. So a continuous track has to be kept regarding the latest trends going into the industry, the opportunities that are tapped and problems that are being faced. After which the editorial and architecture stages come into play in addressing these issues.

There are many dedicated companies across the globe following this kind of structure among which a SPINX Inc., a web design firm in Los Angels is one well-known name.

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