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.

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.

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.

User research allows us to improve our information structures (such as metadata models, data models, websites, intranets) in ways that are helpful to the people using the structure. When I work with clients who are new to user research, they need to know what the process of user research is like and what to expect as an outcome.