Webstruxure’s Ultimate Guide to Optimising Your Web Content can help you make changes to your website content that will make a difference to your users, and improve the way your business manages content.
That’s a really great outcome, but we know from experience that any changes need to gain buy-in from more than just you. You’ve read our guide and you’re feeling motivated and excited to get going. We hear you, we’re excited too! But, proceed with caution.
Reviewing your content strategy and everything that entails will usually have an impact across your business. A content strategy can be an enormously valuable tool. Or it can sit in a drawer, gathering dust, and represent a major waste of time, money and opportunity.
What makes the difference? Taking the time to listen to the people who really count.
Web Content Strategy – it has to work in the real world
If a content strategy is going to work in the real world, it has to work for real people – in particular, the staff of your organisation who deal with and maintain content.
Yet all too often, when consultants are brought in from outside to create a content strategy for an organisation, they don’t talk to anyone below senior management level – or, if they do talk to ordinary staff members, it’s all talking and no listening.
Of course, it’s vital that content and web strategy consultants talk with senior management – but in our experience, it’s rare for senior management to understand what it’s like to be an ordinary staff member who’s expected to write or maintain website content on top of endless other responsibilities, many of which are regarded by their supervisors as a whole lot more urgent than keeping the website up to date.
If consultants don’t make the time and effort to listen – really listen – to content admin staff talk about what life is like for them, then those consultants will never understand the real-world difficulties of keeping web content current, accurate, consistent and relevant. And that means that whatever web strategy they produce will include wonderful sounding recommendations that can never be implemented, at least without investing heavily in many additional staff whose job is solely to update content – something organisations are almost never willing to do.
When Webstruxure is asked to develop a web content strategy, or a broader web strategy, for an organisation, the first thing we want to do is meet with people across the organisation – senior management for sure, but also the people whose job it is to write, enter and maintain content. And we want to take the time to listen to what life is like for staff dealing with content, and what changes would make it easier and less frustrating for those staff to keep the organisation’s website up to date, accurate and consistent.
That way, when we propose a web content strategy, it won’t be just a top-down set of recommendations that look good in a Powerpoint presentation but can’t be implemented. It will also contain a roadmap of real, implementable, incremental changes that will start making things better from Day 1. That way, staff right across the organisation can see things beginning to improve – and that in turn will create confidence in subsequent steps, perhaps including some that involve significant investment.
There are plenty of consulting companies who can run up a shiny web content strategy that will look mighty smart sitting on the CEO‘s desk. But if you want a content strategy that works in the real world, you might want to talk to Webstruxure.