Thoughts from MKE UX: Content Strategy on the Realz

I came into design rather circuitously, my degree is in philosophy and political science, not graphic design or computer science. My interest in design actually comes from my interest in typography which I developed during my senior year. I saw typography as a tool for communicating clearly (an especially important thing in good scholarship). In short for me, typography and design are about communicating and spreading ideas.

To me content strategy, user experience, design, and everything else that goes to building websites is about communicating. With MKE UX, I am relieved that others think this way, too. However, in an industry dominated by small one or two person design shops, it seems this isn’t the norm.

In a world where Smashing Mag, Web Designer Depot, and a plethora of other web design blogs produce endless lists of “the best x design” or Photoshop how-to tutorials, it seems that the vast majority of design houses out there are just building sites that look pretty and the design has little relationship to the content.

As a small design shop, Enguin Design (apologies for the lack of fresh content, we’re at the tail end of a redesign) often end up working with clients that tell us “I have this idea in my head of exactly what my website should be, I just need you to make it happen.” We have often been brought into projects well into development or near development where development has taken place before any sort of formal research or content strategizing has been done. Oftentimes, a client will say “I have been building a Wordpress site and need you to finish it” with little regard to whether Wordpress is actually the right tool for the situation. In short, Gretchen Thomas’s “Website Bolt-On Syndrome” is the default for a majority of web projects.

When we’re planning our content, we should not even be thinking about the site in terms of pages or the content management solution we’ll be using. We should be thinking of our websites in terms of content types and interactions. What do we need to communicate to our users? What is the best way for us to do it? What is the best way for them to communicate with us? Margot Bloomstein hit the nail right on the head. She barely talks about designing pages. It’s about designing the best way to present content. At the beginning of a project, it is impossible to think in terms of pages, we don’t even know what sort of content there is. Just like we don’t design the magazine before the articles are written, we shouldn’t be building websites before the content is written.