Your website needs the ultimate juggler
It’s about time we all gave credit for those hidden heroes in our organisations. All hail the web content creator.
I had a fabulous conversation this morning with one of my contemporaries in the world of web development.
I’m currently neck deep in a new-to-me CMS. It isn’t complicated. I think once you get the hang of one, you’re pretty much bulletproof for the rest. There are some truly stinking CMS, granted; but all at least make a vague fist at helping the content creator do their job.
So I’m in there, creating sections (because, umm, this CMS doesn’t do pages) just to get the hang of this thing. And we’re talking about processes. How to go from zero to web publishing hero.
We know you start by figuring out objectives for the site. That’s a given. Then you think about your audience, and how you expect (with real ‘presearch’, of course) they’ll interact with your website, figuring out user journeys, use cases, all that good stuff.
Then you create a sitemap of all the places you want them to go. You’ve created the itineraries and the map, and now you have to meld all the directions — that’ll be the content — into this equation. Wireframes, design and build, yeah, that’s all in here.
If you’re managing a particularly large web development project, you’ll need to find people to make that content sing.
They need to be fully briefed on those objectives you set at the beginning.
They need to understand how that content will be pivotal in educating, entertaining, inspiring and engaging your user.
Because without that, you might as well build a wood-fired pizza oven and open up your restaurant with nothing but gas bottles.
Designers in the main boast a natural tendency to ignore the delicacies of content creation. Writers are just there to destroy their amazing art.
In much the same way as some writers having a certain lack of respect for the design community, citing their work as the colouring in of the business world (there’s a fantastic article here about a designer sending themselves to business school, by the way, which flies in the face of my clearly outdated stereotype).
Irrespective of your stance, there’s a given: creating content that goes beyond decorating pages and apps, is incredibly difficult.
You’ll try convincing subject matter experts to write content. They write it in their voice. It’s not their job to understand how your users speak. Disconnect #1.
You’ll speak to a typical writer and and they’ll try to win over the user with flowery, descriptive, enthralling stories. With an insufficient focus on how those tales told in a certain way can motivate people down your funnel, or from A to A in AIDA. Disconnect #2.
The web content creator is a rare breed who can triangulate an artistic bent, a creative thrust, and a commercial acumen. Brevity, accuracy, psychology, context, relevance, value and meaning. Questing for the user not only to feel empathetic towards the website but long to be part of a customer community.
We can’t expect people who have been schooled in non-writing vocations to suddenly turn it on for the camera.
We can’t either expect people who write articles and features for a living, to suddenly translate that talent into what amounts to compelling copywriting but with the added challenge of putting the user at the centre of their universe (copywriting to me is hard-nosed ad copy; copywriting in a website context has to sell, but lose the brute force approach and instead pull the reader close into a loving embrace).
You’re walking a tightrope with website and app content. It’s a discipline all its own.
And it’s tough as nails.
