Strategy and Design

Once you have defined clear project goals and measures of success, and achieved a thorough understanding of user needs and existing resources, you’re ready to begin the strategy part of content strategy. This means taking everything you’ve learned in the first two phases of the project and developing a set of concepts, plans, and guidelines for creating and maintaining content that meets user needs and project goals.

As you read the pages that follow, you may wonder why all of these content recommendations and guidelines aren’t simply created and delivered all at once. On small or informal projects, some of them can be, and even on larger projects, you can usually present several kinds of work to the client at the same time. I’ve presented them in the sequence you see here because especially on larger projects, each batch of work feeds the next. Without understanding your core messages and the structure of your site, you can’t make recommendations on communicating those messages within the site structure; without approval for major changes and big new ideas, it’s folly to flesh out the tiny but important details that will bring those concepts to life.