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If content is king it looks like the king is dead (or at least not feeling very well).

I recently had the opportunity of fielding many requests for building and modifying websites. It came as a surprise to me that in 2008 there was still such little emphasis on the business purpose of a website and the role that content plays in its whole reason for being.


I had requests for tag clouds, rss feeds, forums, rotating images, flash technology, things which moved and changed colour, etc, etc, etc.


On closer questioning it became clear that many of these requests were unrelated to any identifiable benefit to the user or to the business purpose of the website.


I was supplied with information architectures for content which did not exist and in all probability would never exist so that sites were either published without meaningful content (happy pages – such as ‘how nice of you to visit this page – its lovely to see you – do you like my rotating image – would you like to subscribe to this page?) or part of the IA was pulled leaving the site derelict in design and purpose.

On closer inspection of available content it was evident that much of it was:

• Out of date


• Badly written


• Of questionably value


• At odds with information given elsewhere on the same or related sites


• Not written for the web environment

When web owners create information architectures and web pages they should ask themselves the following content related questions:

• Do I have any content?


• Will I ever have any content?


• If the content needs regular updating to be useful will anyone be updating it?


• Will the content be written by experienced website writers? If not will style guides be provided and publishing approval processes set in place?


• Is the content suited to templates? If so can I, to some extent, enforce standards and consistency?


• If the content is suited to templates can it be reused, exported, imported?


• Where does the content sit in the overall information environment of the organization? Can this content be leveraged off content which exists elsewhere?


• Can content updating be used to trigger secondary actions such as changes to content on other content pages?


• Is the content of any real value to a reader, for example, does the reader actually care that you are ‘An organization going forward with solutions logistics priorities’. If you found the page through an external or internal search would you be underwhelmed?


• How granular should the content be? By this I mean do you want 1 page about 10 things or 10 pages about one thing each. This has an impact on the site IA and therefore content find-ability. It also impacts on readability.


• Does the content deliver or facilitate the expected outcome? For example, if you list upcoming events do you make it easy for users to attend the events? This relates to the content writer’s knowledge of how best to present different types of information such as instructions, policies, concepts, etc.


• If content does facilitate an outcome does that outcome match your business goals?

Most importantly the content needs to be user tested. Much is made of testing the information architecture, of making sure that accessibility and usability guidelines are followed and this is of course very important. But all is for naught if a user can’t effectively use the content.

Labels: business requirements, website content