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    Content Strategy for WordPress
    Content Strategy for WordPress
    Content Strategy for WordPress
    Ebook244 pages1 hour

    Content Strategy for WordPress

    By Stephanie Leary

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    About this ebook

    Content strategy is a plan for creating and maintaining web content that supports your organization’s goals. Creating modular, reusable content is the only way to keep up with all the different ways your users are consuming content—but how do you do that when you’re looking at a big blob of stuff in your page's visual editor?
    Content Strategy, WordPress Tactics
    In this book, you'll learn how to implement a complete content strategy in WordPress:

    evaluating your site with a content audit
    content modeling to create structured content
    providing context-aware content like related posts and contextual sidebars
    rearranging content for mobile layouts
    creating a better authoring experience, with clutter-free editing screens, inline help, and a style guide right in the dashboard
    workflows and email notifications
    sharing data with RSS feeds and a REST API
    ...and more

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStephanie Leary
    Release dateApr 25, 2015
    Content Strategy for WordPress

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      Book preview

      Content Strategy for WordPress - Stephanie Leary

      Introduction

      Content strategy is a plan for creating and maintaining web content that supports your organization’s goals. In a perfect world, everyone would have a strategy in mind before they started building their websites, and they’d add just enough content to achieve their goals, and no more. But most of us add content to our sites with only the vaguest of goals. That seems like a good idea, we think, and then it’s published, because WordPress makes it really easy to publish things. What we didn’t consider was that every new thing we published would become something we’d have to maintain.

      If you’ve been managing a site in WordPress for a while, you’ve probably realized that having a good content management system—which you do!—doesn’t solve all your problems. Although software can certainly help or hinder the process, creating and maintaining good content is a people problem.

      Most of us manage sites that have long since sprawled beyond their initial scope. Maybe you’ve added a ton of content over the last few years, and your public-facing site is doing a pretty good job of meeting your readers’ needs. You, however, are working twice as hard, because you added all that new content in a hurry, stuffing it into the big visual editing fields and sidebar widgets as best you could, without ever slowing down to figure out if that was really the best way to do things.

      And now you have a great big unmanageable mess.

      We can fix that!

      First, you need to visualize what you want to achieve. We need to know where we’re going before we talk about how to get there.

      Determining your goals

      What does your organization do? How does your web content help you do that?

      What is your content not doing for you now? What could it do, if only you could figure out how?

      Most of the time, bad web content comes in three flavors:

      Too much old and useless stuff

      Not enough of the right stuff

      Stuff that’s in the wrong format

      Fixing the old and useless stuff is straightforward—update it or delete it. Identifying all the old and useless stuff, and assigning people to fix it, is the job of a content audit. That’s the first step you’ll take in evaluating your current site, starting in Chapter 1.

      To add more of the right stuff, you need to figure out where the right stuff goes, when you need it, and who’s going to write it. Some of this will happen as you update things based on your content audit notes; for new articles, an editorial calendar can help. You’ll see how to do this in Chapters 4 and 5, on editing and maintaining content, respectively.

      Stuff that’s in the wrong format covers a large set of structural issues. Anytime someone in your organization says, Wouldn’t it be nice if … , pay attention. They’re probably suggesting good ways your existing content could work harder for you—if it were properly structured.

      Structuring content to meet your goals

      Structured content is content that is broken down into its atomic parts, classified, and displayed in ways that are useful to your readers no matter how they’re consuming it. In "Future-Ready Content," Sara Wachter-Boettcher writes:

      We don’t have all the answers, but we do have a clear place to start: with our content itself. As we break our content down, analyze its elements, and document the relationships that turn those elements into a meaningful whole, we can begin to create and manage content in a way that endures, wherever the future leads us.

      Some common goals for structured content are:

      Making content more findable:

      Showing related information: articles on the same topic or by the same author

      Showing a biography of people mentioned in the story

      Changing sidebar information (or removing sidebars) based on context

      Creating faceted searches

      Automating listings:

      Generating linked, alphabetized lists of things rather than maintaining these lists by hand

      Automatically adding calls to action or routing email notifications based on the context of the content

      Prioritizing content for responsive designs:

      Moving navigation for mobile layouts instead of merely collapsing it

      Rearranging higher-priority content for mobile devices when the desktop layout requires it to appear late in the source code

      Getting data out of silos:

      Providing more specific RSS and Atom feeds

      Making data available via an API

      Improving the authoring experience:

      Creating input screens with modular fields that indicate the required format of content

      Providing contextual hints and references for content editors to make data entry less confusing and more consistent

      Removing unused fields that clutter the editing screens

      Improving workflows:

      Adding sensible email notifications when editors’ approval is needed (and eliminating useless notifications)

      Planning and scheduling future content that supports our goals

      Preventing existing content from becoming outdated

      Removing old or useless content before it becomes a maintenance burden

      Think WordPress can’t do all that? Think again.

      Defining your message

      Figuring out your organization’s message (what you need to say) and your editorial voice (how you’re going to say it) is a huge part of content strategy—and I’m not going to cover it in this book, because it’s something you’ll handle outside of WordPress. You need to discuss your goals with your stakeholders, talk to your users about their goals, and think about how your web content should help everyone get where they want to be.

      If you haven’t already, you need to read Content Strategy for the Web, Second Edition by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach, especially Chapter 8, Content. It will help you answer questions like:

      What are our business goals?

      What resources do we have?

      What are our key messages?

      What voice (or personality) should our site use?

      Pause here, grab Content Strategy for the Web, and figure out your overall strategy. When you’ve figured out what you’re going to write, come back and I’ll show you how to do it.

      Implementing your content strategy in WordPress

      There are five basic steps to implementing a content strategy:

      1. Evaluate the content you have. This usually starts with an inventory or an audit of all the content on your site. It also involves determining the effectiveness of that content and deciding what to keep and what to prune away.

      2. Analyze your requirements. Do you have functional requirements your current site isn’t meeting? (We need a product catalog.) How about organizational requirements? (We need to be able to sort products by price. We have a list of people, but it’s not alphabetized.) Make a list of the things you need WordPress to do for you that it’s not doing now.

      3. Structure your new content. Do your posts contain pieces of information that would be more useful if they were broken out into separate, more modular fields? Do you have posts that shouldn’t be posts, but should be some other kind of content (like catalog items or personnel bios) instead? Would it be helpful if you had a third way to categorize or tag posts? Create models of the kind of content you need, not the blog post with title, body, categories, and tags WordPress encourages you to use. This step is often called content modeling, and it’ll be a large portion of this book.

      4. Edit the old content. Create a style guide and put it where your content authors can find it. Fix things you identified as outdated during your inventory. Move posts out of the blog and into the new structured content you created. As you learn how to create new content models later in this book, you’ll also learn how to convert your old posts, pages, categories, and tags to your new structures. You won’t have to copy and paste! (Much.)

      5. Maintain your newly fixed-up site—and create a plan to add new content in a sustainable way. Set up schedules and reminders to review content periodically to prevent it from falling out of date again.

      You can do each of these steps within WordPress, including the evaluation.

      Content strategy, WordPress tactics

      You know that creating modular, reusable pieces of content is ideal—but how do you do that when you’re looking at an Add New Post screen that contains a big rich-text editor where you have to lump everything in?

      WordPress can do this. But it’s not immediately obvious when you’re looking at the Dashboard screens, and it’s going to take a few plugins—or some code of your own, if you’re up for that—to get there.

      WordPress content can be a lot more sophisticated than the posts, pages, categories, and tags you see in your Dashboard. However, the content-building features are hidden from general users. To take advantage of them, you’ll need to either write some code—which you can mostly copy from the examples in this book—or install one of several plugins that expose the hidden features to you. If you are uncomfortable with PHP, the latter option is for you. You don’t have to become a developer! I’ll show you how to use some of the most popular plugins for each aspect of content building; you can decide whether to use just one or combine them to achieve your site’s goals.

      WordPress’s content-building features are custom fields, taxonomies, and post types.

      Custom fields let you add new pieces of data to an existing content type. For example, you could add a Location field to your posts if you are a travel blogger. Custom fields let you break out of the big rich-text editor to create modular bits of content in your posts and pages.

      Custom taxonomies let you group posts in new ways. A taxonomy is a new pool of categories or tags. For example, if your movie review posts are currently tagged with actors, directors, and genres, you could organize things more logically by creating three separate taxonomies rather than mixing all those tags together. You could then get a list of all the actors you’ve tagged without having other kinds of tags cluttering things up.

      Custom post types are new set of articles that are separate from (but similar to) posts and pages. If adding fields and taxonomy groupings to your posts isn’t enough, and you need to create a new catalog of items that’s logically separated from your blog posts, then custom post types might be a good solution.

      You will see lots of examples of these features as you read this book, and you’ll learn how to take advantage of all three to build the kind of content your site needs. It’s also possible to have WordPress perform new tasks, like email notifications, and I’ll show you how to do that in Chapter 5, Maintaining Content.

      Further reading

      The content strategy group Predicate has a more detailed implementation plan as part of their "Approach to Content Strategy" presentation, which I encourage you to check out if you’re working with a large organization. Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper’s Managing Enterprise Content might also be useful in larger organizations.

      Mike Atherton’s workshop, Modeling Structured Content, is a great overview of content modeling using the BBC’s Natural History archives as an example.

      Content Everywhere, by Sara Wachter-Boettcher, is an outstanding book that describes the process of creating structured content for any content management system. Content Strategy for Mobile, by Karen McGrane, will give you lots of ammunition if you’re battling recalcitrant stakeholders who don’t see why this content strategy thing is worth their time—or yours.

      If you’re going to read

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