Richard Sheffield - The Web Content Strategists Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds

The Web Content Strategists Bible

The Complete Guide to a New and Lucrative Career Path for Writers of All Kinds

CLUEfox Publishing Atlanta, GA
Copyright 2010 Richard Sheffield. All rights reserved.

First Kindle edition 2010

Copyright 2010 Richard Sheffield, the United States of America. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form, for any reason or by any means, whether redrawn, enlarged or otherwise altered including mechanical, photocopy, digital storage & retrieval or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher (with the exception of a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper or magazine).

The text, layout and designs presented in this book, as well as the book in its entirety, are protected by the copyright laws of the United States (17 U.S.C. 101 et seq.) and similar laws in other countries.

This book includes information from many sources and gathered from my personal experiences. It is published as a general reference and not intended to substitute for independent verification by readers where necessary and appropriate. The publisher and author disclaim any personal liability, directly or indirectly, for advice or information presented within. Although the author and publisher have prepared this manuscript with utmost care and diligence, we assume no responsibility for errors, inaccuracies, omissions, or inconsistencies.

Attn: Quantity discounts are available to your company, educational institution, or writing organization

For more information contact the publisher, CLUEfox Publishing, at cluefox@gmail.com

This book is dedicated to my parents and grandparents, who made sure that, if I learned nothing else in school, I learned how to write.

Notes on the Kindle Edition

Like a good content strategist, I use a single content source file for all versions of this book (print, PDF download, and now Kindle). The upload and conversion process for the Kindle makes some, interesting decisions. So the formatting of this version has some oddness to it.

Ive adjusted things as best as I can without compromising the layout of the other versions, so I hope you will not find the layout too distracting.

See Appendix D for information on downloading the bonus PDF version of the book that may have a better layout in certain applications.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to my bosses and co-workers at KnowledgeWare, who let me run with my crazy ideas about putting reference information up on the then, brand new Web.

Thanks to everyone I worked with at IBMs Interactive Design Studio and Arts Caf, where we got to push the idea that this is REALLY not your fathers IBM!

Thanks to everyone at UPS for allowing me to put to work all the things I learned about content strategy.

A special thanks goes to Dr. Margaret Walters and Dr. Sarah Robbins for all kinds of help.

Contents 5

Tables 11

Figures 12

Introduction 13

Chapter 1 An Introduction to Web Content Strategy 32

Chapter 2 Why Web Development Project Plans Fail And How Web Content Strategy Can Help 41

Chapter 3 Content Strategy During the Discovery Phase 47

Chapter 4 Content Strategy During the Analysis Phase 62

Chapter 5 Content Strategy During the Design Phase 79

Chapter 6 Content Strategy During the Build Phase 107

Chapter 7 Content Strategy During the Maintenance Phase 112

Chapter 8 Content Strategy and Translations 119

Chapter 9 Search Engine Optimization and Content Strategy 134

Chapter 10 What You Need to Know about Web Content Management Systems
150

Chapter 11 Getting Your First Job as a Web Content Strategist 163

Appendix A Supporting Research 170