Content strategy focuses on the planning, creation, delivery, and governance of content.
Content not only includes the words on the page but also the images and multimedia that are used. Ensuring that you have useful and usable content, that is well structured, and easily found is vital to improving the user experience of a website.
Usability.gov has identified these best practices to help you create meaningful and relevant content. Each piece of content should:
- Reflect your organization’s goals and user’s needs. You can discover your user’s needs through conducting market research, user research, and analyzing web metrics.
- Understand how user’s think and speak about a subject. Content should then be created and structured based on that. Doing this will also help you with search engine optimization (SEO).
- Communicate to people in a way that they understand. Embracing plain writing principles helps with this.
- Be useful. By being purposeful in the content that you include, omit the needless.
- Stay up-to-date and and remain factual. When new information becomes available, update your content or archive it.
- Be accessible to all people. You have a responsibility to make sure that all people can access and benefit from your information.
- Be consistent. Following style guides, both for language and design, helps people understand and learn what you are trying to communicate.
- Be able to be found. Make sure that users can find your content both through internally through navigation and also externally through search engines.
- Help define the requirements for the overall site. Content should drive design, structure, etc
I appreciate seeing our government spending time to create these important tips so website creators for gov and the rest of the world, have a solid game plant to starting a website. More here: https://www.usability.gov
