Micah Godbolt - Front-End Architecture: A Modern Blueprint for Scalable and Sustainable Design Systems

Very early on in the development of the web there was a particular personality that seemed to believe the words on any given page were at least as important as the design, the code or even the Search Engine Optimization (everyone knew that keyword stuffing was the way to go). Before they came along content had always been a problem to deal with later. Just throw up some lorem ipsum into the design and move on. The client will eventually fill it in with real, quality, inspired content before the site goes live...really...always.

These lovers of words were ultimately quite vocal that the web was content, and that it deserved our time and attention. It was always a battle, but occasionally they were invited into early planning meetings, and on occasion they were contacted to lend their expertise on proper SEO techniques or to develop a consistent voice and tone for the editorial strategy. They were making progress, and though the fight was difficult and lonely, the results were worth while.

Thus went each of these lone warriors until the fateful day where they happen to come across another logophile, and they realized that they werent alone in this struggle! This single kindling of a friendship quickly grew into a blaze of new connections. Eventually a community of these word disciples was formed, and they continued to focus their efforts on convincing others to treat content as a valuable asset, and not a liability.

A dozen years passed and the fight for content was far from over. But even as one more designer was asked to just make something up for the homepage copy, a new rallying cry could be heard in the distance. December 16th, 2008 was the day that Kristina Halvorson stood up high atop A List Apart Blog and raised a banner for Content Strategy. She asked us all to take up the torch and begin treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment. Those who practice Content Strategy were to Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. They were to become Content Strategists. And like that, a Discipline was born.

Ms. Halvorsons article was not the first one to approach the topic of content strategy, but what it did was define the heart, soul, and purpose of Content Strategy, and the Content Strategist. Overnight, a large group of web content creators realized that they had a name, a discipline and a collective calling. These Disciples would usher in an era of blogs, podcasts, and conferences revolving around this simple notion that content mattered.