Strategic Web Design – Begin with Content

As a result of my last blog, It’s More About Design than WordPress vs Drupal, I began a search for guidance about website design on other than technical web features.  Being retired, I dive into topics when the need or the interest arises.  It’s like living a jigsaw puzzle life, I’m fascinated by the manner in which one issue leads into another and I want to see how they fit together.  (Note: you’ll probably see several jigsaw puzzle related graphics on my blog.)

Serendipitously, as I was catching up with various publications using FlipBoard on my iPad this morning, I saw the term “content strategy” on a A List Apart blog posting, Strategic Content Management, by Jonathan Kahn.  I knew I had found the crux of my search by a statement in his first paragraph,

“We know that a successful web project needs a content strategy—but when it comes to the CMS, we stop thinking strategically. Despite all the talk about user-centered design, we rarely consider the user experience of the editorial team—the people who implement the content strategy.”

That’s the same sentiment with which I ended my prior post.  It’s all about fitting the jigsaw pieces together.  Great website content with poor delivery is as bad as a well-delivered website with poor content.  Content strategy is a key component in the design of the website, which includes the content management system (CMS).

He also writes,

“Most of the time we select a CMS by popularity, cultural affiliation, or corporate edict—that is, without properly considering the content we’re supposed to be publishing. This is crazy. Instead, we should use a design process to select and customize a CMS, based on our content strategy and the editorial team’s needs.”

Jonathan Kahn’s blog post is like a mini-seminar on the CMS selection and customization process.

My future blog posts will delve into content strategy and other aspects of strategic website design in mini-bites.

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It’s More about Design than WordPress vs Drupal

While maintaining the website for a very small, grassroots nonprofit as a volunteer, I decided that it was important for me to not be the only one who knew how to do it.  It’s always been important to me that a knowledge or skill not be entrusted solely in one person.

Even though I had created a user maintenance guide, the website still relied too heavily on a knowledge of HTML and CSS.  I started to look for a platform to make it easy for the nonprofit’s staff to do common updates to the website; e.g., events and news.  I considered WordPress and Drupal in my decision making as described in the Nonprofit Technology Network’s (NTEN) recent blog posting, WordPress vs Drupal…!, .  The author clearly addresses the technical issues of WordPress and Drupal from a developer’s point of view.

However, WordPress and Drupal as tools can be misused.  One of the comments to NTEN blog posting describes what happens when a website is poorly designed, “I am so firmly in the WordPress camp that I almost consider Drupal a cussword at this point. That’s because I paid for a client’s site to be developed in Drupal, only to have it be so difficult for the very non-techy client to use without consulting assistance (a VERY important criterion for success for any web project in my world), that I ended up paying for the whole thing to be re-done in WordPress out of pocket.”

In the world of automation, it’s been all too common for me to encounter well-coded databases, which are poorly designed for the user.  This equally true for the design of CMS websites.  Technical coding and design, whether with WordPress and Drupal for websites or Microsoft Access and FileMaker for databases, are very different skill sets, much like construction and architecture.

Design requires the developer to understand the client’s business processes and to consistently address the user in the design of website administration.  The design should be done first, like architectural plans, before any coding (construction) is begins.

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