On Seth Godin’s blog, he relates aligning your brand with customers to relationship building. Indeed, this partnership is the foundation of effective web content. Only when your content meets both your institution’s website goals and your users’ needs can it be called effective. This is a powerful mindset: Partnering with your users is more valuable than serving them because … [Read more...] about Don’t Serve Web Users, Partner With Them
Relinquishing Control of Content Delivery and Context
In the latest issue of A List Apart, Cameron Koczon writes about the state of "orbital content"—where "individual users are the gravitational center and content floats in orbit around them." Users have tremendous control over how they consume content. Applications like Instapaper push the boundaries established by RSS and Google Alerts because they can … [Read more...] about Relinquishing Control of Content Delivery and Context
Web Writing Guidelines for Content Contributors
As web professionals, we owe a lot to our content contributors. Your college website has tons of content, and no one person can do it all. The more you enable content contributors to write for your site (supported, of course, by a thorough editorial process), the closer you will be to your shared goal of creating great content. Here are some web writing guidelines to help make … [Read more...] about Web Writing Guidelines for Content Contributors
Defining Authentic Content
"Be authentic" is popular advice for using social media. But this attribute is not only applicable to social media content. All web content needs authenticity. So what does that mean? How does that requirement fit within a content strategy? How do you plan for authenticity? In a video interview with host Erik Michielsen of Capture Your Flag, Simon Sinek provides … [Read more...] about Defining Authentic Content
ROT: The Low-Hanging Fruit of Content Analysis
Content analysis is an essential part of creating and sustaining effective web content. How do you know if your content is any good if you don’t analyze it? Yet the process quickly becomes complex as you evaluate content against branding, usefulness, relevance, usability, voice and tone, format, search engine optimization, delivery channel and many other criteria. Let's face … [Read more...] about ROT: The Low-Hanging Fruit of Content Analysis