When organizations think about content strategy, a major focus is on plain language, editorial tone, messaging consistency, or channel planning. These are critical elements to make the content strategy work. We can’t miss out on the other critical element that is frequently underdeveloped or overlooked entirely: content structure.

This checklist will help you assess your user research, content structure, content writing as well as ensure you have the proper content governance, genAI legal and regulatory compliance, and accessibility and inclusion standards.

Innovation doesn’t just come in the form of generative AI. Organizations have been innovating with content well before AI came along. How do we ensure that content supports the organizational goals?

Frequently, clients say they want to be innovative on their website or intranet (or another information product) and have a culture of innovation in their organization. What does it mean to innovate with content? What needs to be in place to be innovative?

Having seen inside the world of information management in many different organizations in the last 20+ years, you’ll be surprised at what is actually innovative. You’ll be surprised at what companies are not doing to support their content ecosystem.

User research is essential to content strategy. It provides a deep understanding of your audience, informs content decisions, enhances the content structure and on-page content, and drives engagement and conversion. This research both validates and negates assumptions as well as supports change management. Some organizations can be afraid of doing user research as it might bring up things that are too political or too big to change or too overwhelming. The more frequently you do user research, the more you can iterate without making full-scale revisions.

Website redesigns and content strategy can significantly impact an organizations online presence, customer interactions, and overall success. Based on paste experiences of what has and has not worked well on projects, onboarding is one of the most critical aspects of project success. This blog post delves into why it's essential to onboard stakeholders, who should be involved, and the potential downfalls of not going through this step.

Conducting one-on-one stakeholder interviews gives behind-the-scenes insight to the inner workings and aspirations of your organization. You’ll need this point of view to create a website that resonates with executives, staff, and users and that delivers results. Skipping stakeholder interviews can lead to several problems in a website redesign project.

A stakeholder alignment workshop is not just a meeting, but a strategic initiative to ensure that everyone is on the same page, working towards the same goals, and committed to the project's success. It sets the foundation for a smooth, efficient, and effective project journey.

When it comes to redesigning a website, having a solid content strategy, and executing on the content strategy, different stakeholders within the organization must be engaged and consulted to ensure success of the project and to ensure effective governance.

Task testing is a way to run a client’s site structure through some typical scenarios and get quantitative feedback on how easily users can navigate to relevant or appropriate content. It is normally used as a quantitative research method, although it can also be a qualitative method. In this article, I talk about the quantitative method.

Page flows show how users would move between navigational elements on a website. This article explores page flows and when to use them on a project.

Wireframes are typically a low-fidelity representation of the navigation, structure, and page layout of your site. They are typically drawn up from an end-user perspective. Wireframes are first and foremost a communication tool. This article explains more.

Some people use the terms “site maps” and “information architecture” interchangeably to describe the page structure for a site. This article look at the purpose of site maps.

On the surface, audience-based navigation seems to make sense. After a few attempts at audience based navigation, here are my lessons learned.

Dynamic content display is content on your site that automatically appears without manual curation. This article explains why you should use it.

Often I’m asked what is the difference between site maps, navigation, and taxonomy. This article explains the difference.

Metadata are the workhorses of a content management system (CMS). Simply put, metadata tell your CMS platform what your content is about and let you do things with your content.

When we work on website redesigns, intranet redesigns, or other content management system projects, one question I frequently hear is, “What’s the difference between content types and taxonomy?” A site map, content types, content models, metadata, and taxonomy are all part of a site’s content structure.

Often I hear, “We want to make the process better, we just don’t know how.” The secret to business process improvement isn’t (just) inviting in an expert who will magically change things. The secret is to know what your process are now so that you can change them.

Many projects fail because they don’t engage the right stakeholders early enough in the process. Depending on the tasks of the project, we would engage different stakeholders for different reasons.