“Text instructs, guides, confirms, communicates, connects.”—Kristina Halvorson, Content Strategy for the Web
Content strategy isn’t just about web content for your customers.
It’s also about learning from your experiences to reduce process loss and plan your next iteration.
It was supposed to be simple.
I pictured three steps. I sketched a few versions, and ended up thinking about enterprise content in three phases. The first phase was experience: working on the project. The second phase was the content businesses use to communicate internally about the process. The third phase was shipping the product and publishing the content communicates about the product and the insights gained from the project.
I pictured three boxes with a list of activities and deliverables for each.
But wait, I wanted to show the relationship between the three as a cycle, with the published content informing the next project.
But some of the content deliverables fed back into the process before the publishing phase. And combining internal publishing with external publishing seemed problematic.
And there’s the problem that my three “phases” aren’t even semantically parallel.
So, this cake just isn’t done.
I think I need to make a list of project activities and content deliverables, think about how much I want to generalize about projects, decide whether I want to include content from supporting functions like human resources or IT, and try again.
