I not-so-recently returned from the 2010 Content Strategy Forum, the first-ever conference solely dedicated to interactive content strategy, held in Paris, France, April 15-16.

As soon as I saw the notice about Content Strategy Forum last fall I knew I wanted to find a way to attend. I’d recently made the decision to focus the direction of my business on content strategy, making it the basis for all the Web projects I do with my clients, and had planned for 2010 to be the year of immersing myself in the principles and the practice of the discipline. The chance to get in on the ground floor of this conference, network with the growing community, learn best practices, and get inspiration and insights I could take back and apply to my client projects was too good to pass up. Plus, you know, I could write the whole thing off.

I’d also never been to Paris before, and once I decided to attend the conference my husband and I saw it as a chance for our first trip away together since our daughter was born – April in Paris and a little us time. But the day after we arrived, the Iceland volcano blew its top, resulting in an ash cloud that grounded flights for many days and threatened to keep us embedded in Paris and eating crepes (and away from our 3-year-old daughter) for many weeks to come. What ensued was a madcap “Escape from Alcatraz” scenario that involved long lines, poorly spoken French and Spanish, European road food, unspeakably gorgeous countryside, and our eventual departure from Madrid back to the States.

So because of our tardiness and the insanity involved with getting back, I’ve barely had a chance to think much about my experience with the conference until a couple of weeks ago, when I finally revisited my notes in order to prepare for a short recap of the event for the May San Francisco Content Strategy Meetup. I wanted to share a few of the highlights of my two days there.

A conference just for us

I typically attend conferences either to gather news and trends about the industries I’m working in or reporting on (which means I have ended up at plenty of events surrounded by jewelers, hospital administrators and pharmacists). Or, I go to conferences to glean some insight into skills I want to learn or the overall trends of my business, which means I’ve found myself surrounded by interaction designers or Web programmers. I’ve always feel like an impostor at conferences.

I was nearly done with the first day of the conference when the lightning bolt hit me. This was the first conference I’ve ever been to where everybody in the room was just like me. We were doing an exercise that involved wireframing, but in addition to thinking about the user interface design we had to collaborate on where the messaging went on the page. What did we want to communicate to the customer? What did she want to know first, based on her persona and her goals? I looked up to see my small group thinking hard about copy and the order of messaging, and it dawned on me: “This has never happened to me before!”

Spending two days with people all over the world (170 attendees from 18 different countries) who focus every day on Web content was exhilarating to say the least, and worth the trip in itself. I felt much like I suspect the people who attended the very first An Event Apart must have felt — that I was witnessing the seeding of something that would be very important for the future of our industry.

My takeaways

Led by some of the biggest names in the content strategy world, the workshops and sessions covered a lot of territory. Here are a few of the biggest takeaways for me from my two days in Paris.

There’s a strategy to doing the content analysis.
I attended a hands-on workshop about performing the content analysis Thursday morning, led by Rachel Lovinger of Razorfish and Karen McGrane of Bond Art + Science. It was my first session of the conference, and we worked together in small groups to organize and begin a site inventory in about 10 or 15 minutes.

This exercise brought to light two things: first, there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and second, cross-cultural differences can influence that. (As an example, my own little team was comprised of two folks from eBay Europe and a French content strategist; as the lone American, I found that my approach of jumping in with both feet and figuring out organization and categories as I went along was counter to my German teammate’s more careful and structured approach.)

Rachel and Karen provided a list of variables to consider as you plan your content analysis:

1. How deep do you need to go?
2. How do you ensure you see examples of all the different content types?
3. What are the common pathways that users are likely to take?
4. Can you find content that has been lost or hidden?

Be in the room from the get-go.
The second workshop, “Evolution of Content,” studied how the folks at IQ Content in Ireland are using the agile software development approach to perform user experience projects for clients — which essentially means that rather than working in silos all their team members, including the content strategist, IA, interaction designer and visual designer, work collaboratively.

Presenters Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare talked about the vital importance of having the content strategist or analyst in the room from day one — present at the kickoff meeting with the client and participating actively in the discussion about the site strategy. “How well I’m able to tell the story is dependent on my client engagement and ability to explain reasons for decisions to clients,” Randall said. If she isn’t presented from the first moment as a core member of the team, clients are less inclined to engage with her and listen to her recommendations.

Content evaluation is essential and ongoing
The “Evaluating Content” session by Clare O’Brien at CDA was one of the sessions I was most looking forward to. I’d been reading about CDA’s process for testing and evaluating the effectiveness of content (they call it CUT, or content usefulness toolkit) in the online communities and am fascinated by the process of using metrics to determine content’s direction.

Clare started out by declaring: “Our data burden is stalling our learning process.” In new media, we’ve invented metrics that are supposed to tell us how we’re doing, but that they don’t really tell us what the problem is or how to solve it. People believe that it’s still OK to put any old content into a Web site, and aren’t making the connection between poor content and poor results, she said.

Thirty-nine percent of today’s marketers who are spending a lot of money online are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the conversion rates they are achieving — in the world of conventional media, heads would be rolling from better results than that. A Forrester study recently concluded: “Marketers inevitably discover that the marketing metrics in place today fail to tell the full story about their customers.”

Clare recommended treating content evaluation as a continual process:

• Start by setting benchmarks at the very beginning of a project and asking clients what they expect from their online property.
• Establish an analytics program that tests how people’s behavior with the site actually.
• Use a variety of techniques to perform ongoing content evaluation – click tracking, heat tracking, surveys and multivariate testing included.
• Advocate for testing real copy instead of lorem ipsum in usability testing. This is huge — especially since clients and UX people often worry users will “get hung up on the words.” But as Clare said: “Maybe they should be!”

Editorial strategy: solving the Day 2 problem
Jeff McIntyre, one of my favorite content strategy voices online, addressed what happens after a content strategy is in place and the site launches. “The Web design industry in North America is largely designed around selling patches of blue sky,” he said — meaning that agencies often promise a utopia without acknowledging the work it will take to maintain the squeaky clean, shiny streets.

We have to treat “post-launch” as a phase, Jeff said — and that’s where editorial strategy comes in. While many companies balk at thinking of their Web site as a magazine or at thinking about themselves as being in the publishing business, Jeff argued that they very much  are — and that they need to start thinking that way, putting an editorial calendar and process into place to keep the site fresh and accurate.

Thinking from the outside in
Joyce Hostyn of Open Text talked in “Holistic Customer Experiences” about how so many of our user and customer experience problems start — because a company thinks about process and systems first before they figure out the experience they want a customer to have. She compared customer experience to the layers of an onion — experience is the outer ring, then interactions, then touchpoints and processes, then systems at the inner core.

“Misery moments happen when you take the perspective from the inside out. Magic moments happen when you start with the overall experience you want to deliver and drive inward,” Joyce said.

She compared this to the way Disney creates a magical experience in everything they do, because they started with an emotional theme that they then base all decisions on to create magic in every last detail. Closer to home, she talks about mapping out the experience of a software upgrade for a user — planning from the experience level helps to bridge any silos and create a seamless upgrade process for the end user.

A few of Joyce’s other observations:

• Companies have a hard time seeing content as part of a customer experience. They see usability and design as important, but don’t consider content.
• Starting with an experience and a theme helps us write user experiences with real heart — something largely missing from Web content today.
• A product or service is a means to an end. The value lies in the story, and that’s what we’re here to create.
• You have to consider the backstory as well. A lot of that is happening outside the company-owned interaction points — such as in conversations happening in other places that drive perceptions about a company.
• We have to think about memories as well as experiences. Not only do we care about what messages we are delivering, but also how people remember the messages, because that is arguably just as or more important.

There’s work to be done!
The afternoon keynote was my first time hearing Kristina Halvorson, content strategy’s superstar, speak, and it was a moving and entertaining experience — very easy to see why she has had success winning hearts and minds with her message about the importance of content strategy. Kristina admitted that, as much as she speaks to large crowds each month, she was nervous speaking to a room of content strategists. It was a momumental occasion, and time for a major call to action.

In her speech “Banging the Big Drums,” Kristina gave everyone in the room their marching orders. The next year is our opportunity to not only talk about content strategy, spread the word, educate our clients, make our case … it’s our chance to build case studies. Let’s do things the right way and then document the results. Show the world the value of content strategy. We’re struggling to insert ourselves into our rightful place in the process, and to get clients to understand the value of investing in content. We have to prove that it’s worth it.

What’s next?

We are on the map. Now we take over the world.

Once we all escaped from Europe (and the Europeans were finally able to find seats on a train back home), conference attendees already started talking about 2011 — the location and the theme and substance. Most likely 2010 was the beginning of a whole docket of content strategy conferences that will spring up on the calendar, and so it remains to be seen where we’ll be off to next year. The 2010 conference seemed to be about establishing the legitimacy of the practice — we’re here, what we’re saying makes sense, we’re shaping the future of this together. Hopefully next year we’ll make enough progress that the programs will start delving into the particulars, the best practices, the professional nuances of content strategy.

Download the 2010 Content Strategy Forum presentations on SlideShare.

As an active Web user, you most likely fill out several forms online every day, at a minimum. Forms are how we interact online, and they’re very much a part of our personal and professional lives, like it or not.

So why, as ubiquitous as they are, do so many Web forms leave us feeling frustrated? Why do so many users abandon  a form before they’re finished filling it out? Why does Luke Wroblewski, the man who literally wrote the book on Web form design and usability, feel like he has the right to stand up in front of several hundred Web designers (as he did at An Event Apart in San Francisco last December) and tell us that our forms “look like a poo storm?”

Forms are everywhere, and most of them are ineffective at best, downright unusable at worst. Even veteran Web users struggle to fill them out sometimes. Wroblewski explains the convoluted process that often turns the horse into a hobbled camel: regardless of who initially designs the form, marketing, sales, and IT all have a stake in what it inevitably becomes, each adding their own touches and requirements to it. And often nobody is minding the store to make sure the final form achieves its primary goal: getting users to complete it.

Here are some tips – from Wroblewski’s AEA presentation as well as a couple of my own — for the next time you have to manage the design of a Web form:

1. Resist the urge to ask for every last detail. It’s understandable why it happens. The rare opportunity to get prospects to turn over information about themselves gets your salespeople and marketing teams salivating. But do you really need to ask for a person’s fax number? How about street address? What’s the least amount of information you can collect at this moment? People are more likely to fill out the form if they don’t have to labor over it. Consider each field and requested piece of information carefully before including it. And don’t forget to tell users how you’re planning to use the data, Wroblewski says — people won’t give you an email address or phone number if you’re planning to sell it to someone else or spam them repeatedly.
2. Think linearly. How does the user’s eyes move through the form? Chances are, they do not naturally jump back and forth between side-by-side fields. Users tend to scan down the left side of the page, so your form should be designed accordingly, Wroblewski says. If you do need to jump around, use strong visual cues to draw users’ eyes to where you want them to go next. And by all means, avoid placing the “Clear All” button where users expect the “Submit” button to be — the biggest faux pas of Web form design is to stick a button in a user’s natural flow that will wipe out all of their hard work instead of rewarding them. It’s quite possible they’ll be so disgusted that they won’t bother filling the form out again after that.
3. Don’t break with convention. Because we fill out so many of these things, we’ve all become very accustomed to the design standards of Web forms. Occasionally a talented interaction designer finds a way to tighten up space and give a form a truly unique look that also functions well. But often those who set out to build a better mousetrap fail in their attempts. Certain conventions work, so stick with them. For example, a trend is to place the field labels inside the fields. Designers also try placing them to the right or left, or underneath the field. But Wroblewski says studies show that users complete a form 10 times faster when the labels are placed above the field. Smart, thoughtful design is always welcome, but it’s not always necessary to innovate when a convention works perfectly.
4. Treat the form as a holistic experience. Users get to the form from someplace, and when they finish the form they expect to be taken someplace else. People who create forms sometimes forget this, and focus more on the form itself than on the entire user flow. When sending the user to the form, be careful to only make promises based on reality — let users know what to expect and exactly what they will get from filling out the form. If using a multiple-part form, consider using a progress indicator, and make sure it’s accurate. (Wroblewski uses Fidelity.com as an example of a four-step progress indicator bar that misleads users by failing to mention the requirement to create an account in the middle of filling out the form, a major disruption in the flow.) And by all means spend as much time considering the confirmation page and process as you do the actual form. Users want to know they were successful, and want to be able to do something next as an immediate reward for their efforts.
5. Use a writer. I’ve known some IT people who were great with words. Designers too. But much of the time, forms need content help. Instructions, labels and buttons often don’t communicate clearly what exactly users should do. Calls to action are unclear or nonexistent. And the opportunity to provide context-based help (such as pop-ups explaining what the information is for or why the company is requesting it) is often overlooked. An experienced Web writer can help you see the form from the user’s point of view and craft language that will make your form successful.

You know those brands that you really dig — that you feel you know so much about and relate to so viscerally that you’ll love them forever, like an old college roommate?

Like people, there probably aren’t many of those brands in your life. But the ones you’ve found you’re holding on to, and they continue to delight you with their ability to be there when you need them, to really get where you’re coming from.

Smart copywriting (combined with a great product presented in the right environment) is largely responsible for that fuzzy fondness you feel for a brand, especially when you interact with it online. That was the premise of Denise Wilton’s talk on “Writing for Relationships” at IxDA’s Interaction ‘10 in Savannah earlier this month. Wilton is the creative director of MOO.com, the wildly successful online printing company that has exploded among creatives and entrepreneurs for their fun design options and easy-to-use system.

But a large part of MOO.com’s success, Wilton asserts, is its ability to create a tangible brand online, where customers don’t have the luxury of interacting with a face-to-face salesperson but still crave the same kind of friendly service they’d get at bricks-and-mortar store. (And, in a world where live employees are MIA most of the time at physical retail stores anyway, there’s a real opportunity to deliver superior experiences even when your salespeople are chatty bots following well-crafted scripts.)

In fact, Wilton talks about Little MOO — the friendly bot who sends automated updates about the status of a customer’s business card order — and how people react to it: replying to it, sending email asking how Little MOO is feeling, treating Little MOO like a real relationship. The way Little MOO and all of the copy on MOO.com is crafted fosters relationships with consumers who feel like they know the brand intimately.

Wilton argues against all the people who say users don’t read online. “People read online all the time,” she says. But copy has to be targeted, useful and authentic, or users will indeed skip over it. “We know people only read what’s necessary online,” she says. “We have to make every single word count.”

Relationship-building through smart writing

• Lead customers from the monologue to the conversation. Web pages start out as monologues — you’re telling customers what they need to know. But once you make a sale, or two or three or ten sales, you can begin engaging customers in real conversations, through blogs, Twitter feeds and email newsletters. The tone of voice can be a little different in these communications — more casual, more intimate, maybe even more brand-focused or inward-looking — because you’ve formed a relationship and people start to care, to want to join the tribe. Until then, keep the information useful and strictly audience-focused.
• Figure out what your business is all about. “Are you selling online banking, or are you selling more time to spend with your kids?” Wilton says. “Before you work out your tone of voice, you have to work out what you’re really doing with your business.” A writer who is able to create a tangible, lovable brand voice through copy knows what the brand’s all about, inside and out — and it’s a hard thing to teach that to others, Wilton says.
• Write for context. In the spirit of making every word count, provide copy that truly supports the sales process — avoiding gratuitous prose. “Context is everything! Otherwise you’re just the annoying shop assistant,” Wilton says.

See Wilton’s entire presentation here.

“A heart is not judged by how much you love; but by how much you are loved by others.” – The Wizard, Oz

“I hate our Web site.”

That’s how many of my projects begin. A client calls, in a tizzy and in a rush. The company’s or the program’s Web site (in the client’s words) sucks, and the client is finally sick of it.

At first glance, the site may be (but is not always) nice-looking, with cool graphics, an attractive color palette. But try using it. Try reading it. Try navigating it and wading through content once you get a few levels down, where the interface design devolves from lovely and engaging to mucky and clumsy. Frustrated yet? So are the client’s customers.

The client wants a redesign, pronto. A “facelift,” they may call it. A “makeover.” At this point, it’s my job to back everyone up and analyze why the Web site does indeed “suck.” And almost always, the answer is crystal-clear: the site has no content strategy.

It doesn’t just need a facelift. It needs a heart and a soul.

Bandwagons, start your engines
At this point let me say that by even writing this post I feel like I’m jumping into the content strategy parade that is taking the Web world by storm this year. Fueled by the publication of the book Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson, content strategy is the discipline du jour. It’s the subject of blog posts and Tweets (search for the hashtag #contentstrategy), online groups, and programming at popular Web events such as SxSW. Content strategy is even getting its very own annual conference, debuting this April in Paris, France (and I am proud to say I have forked over the euros to attend).

The world doesn’t need another blog post about content strategy. But over the past several months I’ve made the decision to shift the focus of my business to this important discipline, as the foundation for all of the Web project work I do. I haven’t quite perfected my elevator pitch to friends and family about this change — it isn’t easy to explain Web content strategy to people who don’t live in the Web world — but I do want to explain to my clients and peers why this focus is important to me — and to them.

Content strategy essentially combines everything I’ve already been doing in my work: using business strategy to drive Web content, site architecture, user experience, design and functionality. The difference is that the content strategy comes first, and that the entire process of a site design begins with a well-developed plan for what content should be featured on a site, based on a company’s strategy, goals, audience needs and position in the competitive landscape. The content strategy then drives all other decision-making: information architecture, UX and UI design, functionality, even the choice of a company’s content management system.

What content strategy is, and what it isn’t
There’s more to it than this of course. A true content strategy has to do with not only what the content should be, but where it’s coming from, who’s authoring it, and how it will be managed post-launch. It may include an editorial strategy, an editoral calendar, a style guide. It’s an end-to-end plan for content — rare in a world where content has long been the most-often-neglected element as well as the one that’s hardest to wrestle to the ground in any Web project.

There are hot debates across the Internet about what exactly content strategy entails (some people believe it’s more about classifying and organizing content than about managing it going forward, for example — everyone seems to have a variation on the definition).

And as with any “awakening” in a community, the clamor for content strategy has led to a great number of misunderstandings and misinterpretations among people whose hearts are in the right place but who are repurposing “content strategy” to their own end. I recently read an article that detailed “10 content strategies for 2010,” which included “launch an email newsletter” and “write some white papers” in its list. No. Those are things that may come out of a strong content strategy, but they are not in themselves content strategy.

Kristina Halverson herself course-corrected hungry content strategy disciples on her company’s blog a couple of weeks ago, reinforcing the true definition of content strategy:

Content strategy is a plan to get you from where you are now with your current content (assets, operations, distribution, maintenance, and so on), to where you want to be. But for some reason, we want to skip that part and rush ahead to the execution piece. Which is why we tend to mix up content strategy … with tactics.

Content strategy is the reason for having a Web
The Web is content. People forget that. It’s the entire reason for the Web in the first place. The nature of that content has changed; now content can be text and video and audio and animation and interaction. But it’s still content. People don’t come to the Web for design. They come to solve a problem, to complete a transaction, to learn something, to find entertainment. That involves content in one form or another.

When companies decide to launch a Web site, they know they need a Web presence. They have a sense of what they want to communicate. They know they want something attractive and engaging that wins prospective customers over to their side. Maybe they want a shopping cart, or an online forum, or a cool interactive Flash. They think about content enough to determine what pages they might want, in order to complete an information architecture and build the site framework and navigation. But they don’t think about the guts of the site ahead of time. And therein lies the problem.

As Kristina Halvorson eloquently describes in her book, content development almost always comes in the final one-third of a Web project — after the IA, after the wireframes, after the user testing, after the visual design, after the CMS has been selected and almost completely implemented. What happens next is classic: a Web writer (and how many times I have been that writer!) or a cross-functional team of contributors comes along with a bunch of Word docs. An SEO specialist slaps on some keywords (and the writer rewrites to make the copy search engine-friendly, often rendering it human-unfriendly, but that’s a topic for another post). A content producer copies and pastes Word copy into the CMS and proofreads it for funny characters and formatting.

Launch day. The site looks great! But over time the cracks begin to show. Content is confusing, repetitive, incomplete, inconsistent or dull. It’s also really hard to find. And did I mention out of date? The online forum has a bunch of spam comments. The blog hasn’t been updated in three months. The Web site, quite simply, sucks.

What you get with content strategy
Starting with the guts means you’re starting with the heart and soul of a site, the why and how. What are our goals, and what content helps us achieve them? How do we execute content in a way to meet our specific goals?

Just as example: a company wishes to distinguish itself as a thought leader in its niche. How do we do that? Do we have a truly distinctive voice to bring to the table, a unique point of view and proprietary knowledge that we can share? How can we offer it up in a way that’s engaging, and to what end are we doing so? How do we put the resources in place to sustain our approach over time?

What you get with content strategy is the foundation for a rewarding customer experience that communicates your company’s or organization’s value while meeting your strategic goals. If it’s done right, here’s what that looks like:

• Your site tells a multifaceted, but cohesive, story about who you are, what you’re all about, how you’re different and what users can or should do next — from home page to deepest-darkest detail page.
• Your site design leads users to the most important content and functions, while empowering them to find the content they want the most.
• Your site provides valuable information to users who will come to see it as a go-to source for decision-making, professional enrichment, problem-solving tools, or whatever other purpose your content serves.
• Your site delivers what it promises to deliver. Enough said.

By the way, content strategy isn’t just for Web sites. It’s for your entire online presence, including social media platforms you’re managing. If you’re trying to answer the question “Should we be on Twitter?”, you’re asking the wrong question. Content strategy governs everything you publish online, and content across platforms should be inextricably linked.

I have so much more to learn, and 2010 is my year of immersing myself in content strategy and user experience by attending conferences, reading everything I can my hands on, listening to podcasts and meeting others who are as passionate about this discipline as I am.

But suffice it to say that my focus on content strategy will be a good thing for my clients. At An Event Apart in San Francisco recently, programming guru Jeff Veen declared, “We can make more Web!” Which is great. But in partnership with my clients and with content strategy at our backs, I’m hoping to make better Web.

Email marketing has officially hit its stride, and is taking its rightful place alongside traditional marketing efforts. In its recently published US Interactive Marketing Forecast, Forrester found that many marketers plan to skip direct mail altogether (to the woe of the U.S. Postal Service) and go straight for email. The forecast predicts an 11% growth in email marketing over the next 5 years, and reports that 97% of all marketers say they’ll use email marketing in 2009.

Which makes sense, really — email is cheap, customizable, easy to manage, and more people than ever are accepting of it. Email has become mainstream.

What’s interesting about Forrester’s report, however, is that the research credits the growth of the “social inbox” as one of the reasons for email’s reign. And that’s where things get a little trickier.

For those not familiar with the term (it was new to me), the social inbox bundles a few different concepts. First, there are the true inboxes associated with social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter — and yes, there are companies out there now specializing in email marketing to those places. The social inbox also describes users’ adoption of email software that aggregates updates from all the different feeds to which they subscribe. (Yahoo! launched this kind of new experience with its Mail application in 2009.) But in general the idea is that social media platforms are becoming fair game for email marketing.

The idea of being able to reinforce your email marketing in multiple places may seem attractive to marketers, but we have to understand the implications. The first, of course, is that the social inbox is still taboo as a place to receive direct marketing — even if it’s from a trusted source. The folks at ExactTarget found that while most users found it almost “completely acceptable” to receive promotional messages from companies by email if the user has given permission to do so, they were much less accepting of those tactics through RSS, IM and especially SMS. (See ExactTarget’s presentation for more detail.) Think about what happens when marketing messages start showing up in users’ inboxes all over the Internet — by some counts, we may manage 10 or 20 different inboxes if you count work email, home email, all our voice mail boxes, social media sites, RSS aggregators — unannounced. How fast will users grow frustrated, then become annoyed, then get really livid?

For this future trend to work, we as marketers need to be sensitive to users’ tolerance for e-marketing, understanding more about our customers and how they want to hear from us. This is key, and the discussion about how to do this has most likely only just begun.

But much of the success of the email-social inbox dynamic duo will depend on content. In all the bytes of communications blipping into users’ points of contact with the Internet, are we giving them anything they really want or that truly helps them in their business and their lives? Are we saying the same thing over and over as we reach out to them through different platforms, or worse, are we saying drastically different things that confuse them or turn them off? Or are we telling a cohesive story, using each outreach as a valuable opportunity to share one more enticing piece of the puzzle and tempt them with information they crave?

The collaboration of email and social inbox has the potential to be a powerful tool — but like with most superpowers, there comes great responsibility.

The always-brilliant site Boxes and Arrows recently posted an essay on the dangers of designing without bringing in the content writer. The piece, authored by a designer no less, included a beautiful example of what happens when a Web page template is created lovingly by the interface designer, only to have the live content come in at the end and muck it all up. (See the image here. You’ll laugh. You’ll cry.)

The author’s strong recommendation was that designers should consult with the copywriter early in the process to make sure pages are designed to account for real content. Sound advice, but it got me pondering — at what point did the idea that we start with content become a novel concept?

When content was king
It used to be, not so very long ago, that content and design were not a chicken-or-egg proposition. Copy came first. Design was the act of presenting that copy in a way that was easy and enjoyable to read and understand. From my magazine publishing days to my early career in marcom, the Golden Rule was to write first, think visually later. (It’s one of the reasons that many classically trained journalists and writers have no skills, and little interest, in design. The written word once was the center of everything.)

But times of course have changed. One reality is simply that people read and experience communications differently now, as a result of an overload of information and changing communications platforms. Everyone balks at large blocks of words, no matter how gorgeously crafted they are. Modern copywriters understand that, though, and are prepared to write accordingly.

Imagine how my world turned upside down the first time I worked for a VP of marketing who insisted that the marcom department start with design. The graphic designer would do the layout first, then I would write copy to “fit.” I fought the process with every ounce of my soul. It went against the grain of everything I had ever learned. He used the argument that I presented above: that people don’t read, that design is everything, that content needs to fit within the boundaries of presentation, not the other way around.

The process problem
To this day I still don’t agree with him, but my belief now is that this has become an issue of process, especially as we as marketers produce more of our communications electronically than in print. Web site design especially has pushed content further down the chronological food chain. Designing page templates early has become critical for building a site in a content management system (CMS); therefore, information architecture and visual design are slated for the first 1/3 of a Web site design project, while content (the stuff that gets “poured in” to the CMS) comes in the last 1/3 of the project, simply because process-wise there are so many other things to deal with first.

On the print side, companies take a similar tact to their collateral systems, striving for so much consistency that they design first, and ask questions about what’s necessary content-wise later.

There are two primary dangers with this approach:

1. Design #fail. Illustrated by the link above, once “real” content is loaded into a Web content management system or flowed into a print layout, the original and pure intent of the design is compromised (i.e., the page looks crappy). This can be an occasional problem on individual pages, but the real danger is that it can affect the whole site or system. One of my projects involved editorial updates for a home page that was designed before the company had a content strategy for the page; much of the editorial team’s time involved trying to make the content work within strict design limitations. Neither the design nor the content were all that they could have been.
2. Vapid copy. The design remains beautiful, but the copy says nothing. When the team focuses too hard on what something looks like without considering content, you’re in danger of delivering absolutely nothing of substance to your customer. A client of mine recently showed me the spectacular capabilities brochure their agency had designed for them: specialty paper, precious die cuts, amazing typography, lovely photography. Then the client, a sales and marketing person, told me: “I can’t use it. I had to recreate my own sales sheets to take to clients and try to make them look like this brochure. It says absolutely nothing about what we do or how we’re different. It’s just fluff.”

Everyone all aboard the peace train
Yet as a professional who plays the roles of both a project manager and a copywriter, I know how difficult it can be to start with content. The world we live in today simply no longer accommodates the write first, make-it-pretty later approach (which is condescending and erroneous in its own right). Content and design must work together from day one. Even in proven, recognized process flows (such as with large-scale Web site design) there are some slight tweaks we could all make to more harmoniously help these worlds work together. Some examples:

• Write real (not sample) new content before starting visual design. That doesn’t mean you have to have all 300 pages of a new Web site completely drafted. But understanding the structure, flow and content of a page before designing it is essential for designers. A really well-designed Web site considers the “frame” of the page as well as the inside page layout. Think about five or six main kinds of content you plan to create (about us pages, product pages, catalog pages as examples) and write them, using your planned tone and style. Avoid greeked text as much as possible.
• Think about the whole package before beginning anything. The copywriter, designer, creative director/project manager and business subject matter expert should all be on the same page before beginning. Copywriters and designers need to be allies. A writer needs to understand the vision for the design, and vice versa.
• Work together harmoniously. Remember that in the end, you’re creating communications for your customers (and for your salespeople to help them reach those customers). No one on the creative team should bristle if copy needs to be cut or rewritten. Likewise, no one should feel offended if design ideas go by the wayside due to a shift in direction with copy. In the words of Don Draper on last night’s episode of “Mad Men”: “You’re not an artist Peggy. You solve problems. Leave some tools in your toolbox.” Work to make content and design support each other.