Content Strategy and Design Process – interview with Karen McGrane

A topic of discussion in the studio today was an interesting interview with Karen McGrane, the former VP and National Lead for User Experience at Razorfish.The podcast transcript is available at www.uie.comÊand features a number of really interesting thoughts:if you aren’t getting the traffic you’d like to see on your site, is it the design that’s the issue or is it the content you are providing?make the connection between information architecture and content strategy; information architecture can be described as “We’re going to have these things. We’re going to populate the data this way. We’re going to do this, this and this.” and content strategy is more about “who is actually going to write this stuff and how are they going to write it and what’s the production schedule. How are they going to make sure its got the right tags and metadata…”care and feeding of a website is not just about adding new content, its also about taking content out when its no longer relevant”You will never be able to deliver the experience you want to deliver on the front end if you don’t have a good experience on the back end.” This is an area where Drupal still needs to improve but we revise our Drupal sites admin interface based on each client’s specific workflow and content needs rather than relying on a generic experience. The challenge then becomes how much of this customization can the client afford?ÊÊ

• Author: Laura Mitchell