Content First Strategy

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Someone can craft the content first and then design the website layout to compliment the contents instead of building a website that will need an unknown amount of content to fit within a prebuilt box, that may be built to satisfy more or less content than needed.

How do you craft your content first? An outline is a good place to start.

To build this outline, you can take the main menu items and submenu items from a complimentary site, and extract ‘their outline’. Some bullet points refer to a page and some refer to content on the parent’s page.

For example:

  • Home : 7 word statement and call to action
  • About : attractive photo of the team
    • Company
    • Jacob
    • Tony
    • Tanya
    • Nathaniel
  • Services
    • Domains
    • Hosting
      • Managed
      • Advanced
      • Dedicated
    • Web Design
    • Web Development
    • Email
      • Spam Filtering
    • Marketing
      • Eletters
    • Packages
      • Pregnancy Centers Websites
        • Content Creation optional addon
      • Basic Business Package
        • Content Creation optional addon
    • Video production
  • Portfolio
    • 6 featured examples and 4 recent examples
  • Testimonials
    • several categorized quotes
  • Blog
    • Organized by topic
  • Contact
    • Contact Info
    • Contact form
    • Social Media Links

After you have an outline to start from, you can modify this outline to make it ‘your outline’.

Your outline will guide you on what content you need to collect, prepare and craft as each page in the outline refers to content. The outline also indicates where your content will be located in the new website.

To craft the text for each page, you have a few general options:

  • Copy someone else’s content (dishonest)
  • Copy and modify someone’s content (low quality)
  • Write content
  • Have a talented writer interview the expert in your organization about the content that belongs on the page and craft the appropriate amount of content(high quality).

Are you interested in using a content strategy for your website? We think that would be awesome and exciting!

More: http://www.abookapart.com/products/the-elements-of-content-strategy

Author

Jacob Barr
Jacob Barr is the owner and CEO of iRapture.com.
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