This technique is all about discovering who your audiences are and what they need so you can map this to the content on your website. Doing this is a really important when creating user-led content.
One great way to get started with this is to run a content discovery workshop.
Get your sticky notes ready! (more…)
Whether you are creating a new website or simply adding a few new pages; one of the most important things to do is to bring the right people together to actually write the copy. There are a number of ways you can collaborate on content writing, but pair writing has proven to be a very popular technique in recent years. In this post I will talk about the technique and how it can improve collaborative working and the output on your website.
Pair writing, unsurprisingly involves two people sitting down together and writing copy in real-time. It really is as simple as that!
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A user story is a useful method to help you focus your content on what a user wants to achieve when they come to your site or web page. Thinking about the content in this way can also help you with the tone of your writing and creating page titles and summary paragraphs. (more…)
One really popular technique when planning a new website or a redesign is card sorting. This involves some willing participants being presented with a number of cards, each representing a piece of website content or information. For example: ‘contact form’, ‘Support FAQs’, ‘course list’ or ‘news’.
The aim of the game is to ask them to organise the cards into groups to form a potential structure (information architecture) for the content on the website. (more…)
This is the first in the series of posts where I will go through some of the techniques you can adopt to improve the effectiveness of the content on your website. There are so many techniques out there, but what I will try to do here is to talk about the ones that I think are useful to us at Imperial. The first of which is content audits.
You may be doing an entire site redesign or updating a large section of your website. Before you push ahead with planning and producing all that lovely new content, you should first find out what you have there already, and how good it is. This is where a content audit comes in very useful. They are also a good thing to do from time to time in order to do a bit of housekeeping. (more…)