Empowering higher education to create and sustain web content that works
The following guest post was written by Courtney Mallam, content specialist at Glendon College, York University in Toronto, Canada. Producing great web content isn’t easy — particularly when operating as the only designated content creator in your division. Some days, finding opportunities to thoughtfully plan and create content can feel like a small miracle. At Glendon College, we needed someone (or a whole team of someones!) to help tell our [...]
The following guest post was written by Katy Zimmerman, Content Strategist at Colorado Technical University. What if I told you that you have a team of expert writers at your disposal? It’s true. Content professionals in higher education are sitting on a potential gold mine of untapped authors. University faculty are subject-matter experts in their field, and many also have excellent writing chops. But how can you best use these [...]
When people think about content governance, they often think roles, responsibilities, workflow and documentation. But there’s an element to content governance that is equally important and often overlooked: training. Content governance means understanding existing expertise and knowledge gaps and training content contributors on policies, guidelines, workflow and best practices. To make sure your staff has the necessary expertise and the ability to do great work, training needs to be part [...]
Any digital initiative — be it a website redesign, a social media campaign, or an enewsletter — should follow a content-first approach. But, as content strategist Corey Vilhauer reminds us, “There is no universal content strategy methodology.” Thanks to the insights shared from our peers across higher education and the broader world of content strategy, we have a lot of models to learn from and adapt for our needs. Yet, [...]
Web content workflow and governance include many moving parts. In order to keep the wheels turning, roles and responsibilities must be defined to make sure that all work gets done and that content contributors have clear expectations about their own and others’ responsibilities. As described in Content Strategy for the Web, 2nd Edition by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach: "It’s critical for each person to know what their role is [...]