"Eight Things You Can Do Now to Improve On-Screen Readability"

Do you agree with this article? I don't -- especially the part about creating and embedding a custom font.

I think it's a good thing readers have control over how information is displayed on their computers. I once had a colleague with low vision, and for him, it was easiest to read content online if he had the background set to a dark color -- usually purple -- with the type in white or yellow.

For a designer, "user-centered" means checking aspects of your ego at the door. (It does for content folks too, just in different ways, but we'll tackle that in another post someday.)

Comments welcome....

good Web content represents the meeting between what you want to tell people and what they want to know

It's one thing to post information on your site, and another thing altogether to make it relevant to the reader.

People come to your site with a goal in mind -- research a specific product, find out whether they should work for you, apply for a grant, conduct a transaction with you. If you think about it, you know what their goals are.

Help them do what they came for. Don't make them visit several sections of the site -- if your information must live in separate places, link to the information they are likely to want.

Read a longer article about this on my website.

More on the "why" of content management

I recently read a quote in Utne Reader that brought home my point about content management: “America is strong on how and weak on why.”

Most of the content management information out there is devoted to the “how”:

• how newer, more robust and more usable software will enable more content management functionality
• how to do more inside your organizations
• how to get more out of your IT department

But without the why, the how is risky and may be an expensive failure.

Why do we need to manage content?
Do we manage content offline, or is this a case of using technology simply because it exists?

The projects I’ve worked on usually have a mantra: Just because we can doesn’t necessarily mean we should. I completely agree with this.

So....

• make sure rules exist for content before building templates
• make sure legal department will log into the CMS to review and approve content before paying extra for a system with complex branching and looping workflow
• make sure updating content is someone’s responsibility before setting rules where the lack of approval causes a piece of content to be automatically deleted.

CMS software can enable ever more nuanced rules for assigning, storing, approving, publishing, surfacing, archiving and deleting content. But it cannot create order where none exists, can’t write the business rules and can’t substitute for a strategy.

creating an online content strategy -- the "why" before the "how"

I'm giving a talk about online content strategies at the Gilbane Conference on Content Management Technologies in San Francisco next month. In developing the presentation, I keep stopping at the "why" of content strategy before delving into the "how."

Why is this? I keep asking myself.

I think it's because content strategy is not really understood, especially by folks in IT, who are focused on figuring out which Content Management System (CMS) to buy. To IT, it's clear that there is too much content and there are too many people in a flurry to post, change and remove information from the site, and CMSs hold the promise of taking responsibility for doing all of that away from them and put into the hands of the "content owners."

But it's not that simple. In fact, if it were, the chain of command for information would have been figured out a long time ago.

The reality is, most organizations have never had a content strategy. Why? Three reasons, as I see it:

1. They didn't know they needed one. And maybe they didn't. If each of their business units operated as an independent entity, publishing information (sales sheets, newsletters, marketing materials) to discrete audiences with no overlap with the organization's other business units, they may not have needed to become unified.
   
   
2. They didn't know how to create one. That's understandable, since folks have only been thinking about content strategies for a relatively short time, since the Internet became prevalent in the 1990s.
   
   
3. They didn't have the time or people to do it. That's where I think I get stuck, because if an organization just chooses to overlook this process, they're making a big mistake. (For more, read my article on the risks of not managing content.)

Well, I hope Gilbane conference attendees learn something from my talk.

content management system vs. page update tool?

I was recently emailing with a former client, who told me that rather than buying a full-fledged CMS, they had purchased a smaller system they call a "page update tool." I'm a little surprised, I guess, but not entirely. And I imagine that the folks who will be using the tool might be pleased about it.

With a completely decentralized publishing model, this organization probably can't do more than enable folks to reuse their own content -- and even that might be in a future phase. If this tool gives the central IT group the time to think through the bigger-picture issues, it's money well spent.

does the world need another blog? maybe....

This is my first real foray into the world of blogging. I've had this blogger account since 2001, but I couldn't really make it work. My first vision for using a blog was as a homepage for my synagogue's website, so that the synagogue administrator could post news as it occurred, then gather it into a newsletter at the end of the month. But the admin was intimidated by the idea of instantly posting information, or never had time to try it out -- not sure what the exact reasons were, but my idea went into a black hole.

I also planned on experimenting with this blog to discuss my thoughts on Web content, but I wasn't sure how to determine what to publish or not. I'm still not sure, but I'm more comfortable with that unsurety now.

Well, I definitely have a lot to say about online content, and people do seem to want to hear my opinions, so this seems a good way to share them.

That's it for now -- more soon!