Sara Wachter-Boettcher - Content Everywhere

STRATEGY AND STRUCTURE FOR FUTURE-READY CONTENT

Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content

By Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Rosenfeld Media, LLC

457 Third Street, #4R

Brooklyn, New York

11215 USA

On the Web: www.rosenfeldmedia.com

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Publisher: Louis Rosenfeld

Managing Editor: Marta Justak

Interior Layout Tech: Danielle Foster

Cover Design: The Heads of State

Indexer: Nancy Guenther

Proofreader: Sue Boshers

2012 Rosenfeld Media, LLC

All Rights Reserved

ISBN: 1-933820-87-X

ISBN-13: 978-1-933820-87-3

LCCN: 2012950613

Printed and bound in the United States of America

For William

This book is for anyone who cares about content and is interested in making it work for mobile devices, across multiple channels, and for an increasingly unfixed future.

You might consider yourself a content strategist, as I do. If so, as you strive for content thats useful, meaningful, and sustainable, this book will help you think about all the places that content might go: desktop computers, yes, but also mobile devices, read-later applications, social media platforms, and myriad other places we havent even thought about yet.

Or, you might be an information architect or user experience designer tasked with structuring websites and designing navigation systems. In addition to designing macro systems for information, this book will show you how to construct more micro systems: structures within a single piece of content that allow you to do much more with it, from creating deep connections within a single site to building multiple products off the same core base of content.

If youre a writer or editor, this book is designed to get you thinking less about pages of content and where theyll live on a website, and more about the components that lend your content life. When you do, youll discover that the best way to keep the story, message, or meaning of your content intact isnt to try to control how it looks on the page; its to give it the underlying structure that will let it be styled and used in appropriate ways wherever it goes.

You might also be a content manager wrangling a big CMS. An SEO specialist. A mobile designer or developer whos trying to make your creations work with real content. Whatever your background or job title, if you want content that can go more places, more easily, then this book was written just for you. I hope you enjoy it.

A couple hundred pages of ideas, models, concepts, tips, and a bunch of stories about people trying new ways to make their content work harder.

Practically speaking, though, this book is divided into four parts:

explores the problems with content that is fixed and inflexible, and talks about how we can start looking at the content we create differently. It also defines how four key disciplines set a foundation for todays challenge: content strategy, information architecture, technical communications, and content management.

is all about building a framework: a way of breaking content down, building it up in meaningful models, and understanding whats at play as it starts being used and reconfigured using everything from markup to media queries to APIs.

digs into a few of the myriad things you can do with your content once youve sorted out how its structured and stored: make content more findable and interconnected, make it work harder on responsive and adaptive sites, reuse it across multiple products and personalized experiences, and prepare it to even leave your control completely.

will leave you with a call to get startednot just with structuring your content, but with changing your organization and its relationship to content, too. With these skills, you can create content thats audience-centric, lively, and lovableeven as it is replicated and reused.

This books companion website ( rosenfeldmedia.com/books/content-everywhere/ ) contains some templates, discussion, and additional content. The books diagrams and other illustrations are available under a Creative Commons license (when possible) for you to download and include in your own presentations. You can find these on Flickr at www.flickr.com/photos/rosenfeldmedia/sets/ .

The way I talk about it, content everywhere doesnt mean splattering your message in every corner of the Web. Its about investing in content thats flexible enough to go wherever you need it: multiple websites, apps, channels, and other experiences. Why? Because devices of all shapes, sizes, and capabilities are flooding the market, and users expect to get your content on all of them, which you can read about in .

Right now, most organizations can barely keep up with their large, unwieldy desktop websites, much less multiple different sets of content for all these different experiences. Content everywhere is all about learning how to prepare one set of content to go wherever its needednow and in the future.

Today, most digital content is unstructured: just words poured onto a page. To signify where one part ends and another begins, writers use formatting, like upping a font size to be a headline or putting an authors name in italics. This works fine if your content is only going to be used on a single page and viewed on a desktop monitor, but thats about it.

Structured content, on the other hand, is created in smaller modules, which can be stored and used in lots more ways. For example, you could display a headline and a copy teaser in one place, and have a user click to read the restsomething you cant do if the story is all one blob. You can give the same content different presentation rules when its displayed on mobile, such as resizing headlines or changing which content is prioritized or emphasizedautomatically. In this way, adding structure actually makes content more flexible, because it allows you to do more with it. You can learn about this in .

If your content is needlessly complicated and full of fluff, then yes: Your content should be simplified for mobileand for everywhere else, too. After all, a user with a desktop computer doesnt want to wade through filler either. But should your mobile users be offered lite versions of your content rather than the real deal? No.

While you might know what people do most often on their mobile devices, you cant know what theyre intending to do on any specific visit. After all, .

In the past, content modeling work was often just called data modeling, so it was done by database developers. Thats not necessarily a bad thing, but it has its problems. Because content can be much more ambiguous and conceptual than other sorts of data, it needs attention a developer alone is unlikely to give it. If you want content to communicate a message, tell a story, or do something specific for your organization or your users, then you need someone who understands what the content means and how it means it there when youre making content modeling decisions.