Spaghetti Testing | Peter Smith

What’s my basis for content strategy? In other words, what’s the purpose of my web content?

I’m taking a service orientation.

Working in government, my starting point is that people using our web content are doing so because they have specific tasks to complete. They’re not coming to our websites for fun. They’re coming because they need to get something done. This isn’t just an assumption, we’ve seen it in all the research and data we’ve collected.

So I’m taking a page from Gerry McGovern’s work and using top task management as a basis for content strategy: the primary purpose of web content for my org is to assist people in completing the tasks that they come to us for online.

So, how can our content help people with their tasks? Three ways:

• find the task (marketing or promotional content, landing pages and other forms of nav content)
• understand the task (explanations, instructions, guides, help)
• complete the task (forms, workflows, transactions, or contact info for handling the task offline)

Now, I’m part of the team responsible for the what we call the top level of our web content, i.e. the home page and key landing pages at the top of the sitemap. I don’t actually have any control over the places on our site where the tasks themselves are actually situated. Given that, I want our web content to act as a funnel that delivers people efficiently to the tasks they’re there to accomplish. This means that findability first and foremost is my focus.

By findability, I don’t mean SEO. (Well I do, sort of. But that’s fodder for a separate post.) And at this point, I’m not even talking about digital marketing that takes place offsite — in social media or through Adwords or what have you. (We’re just not there yet, we need to fix our core website first.) So I’m really talking about those landing pages I mentioned above. I don’t want them to be a reflection of our org chart or an A-Z list of our program and branch names — that’s too internally focused, unintelligible for our clients from outside the firewall. I want our key landing pages to make sense of the tasks that our clients can undertake on our site, especially the ones that they see as most important. I want these pages to approach our content from the client point of view.

That’s the basis of my content strategy. Pretty simple really.

In my next post, I’ll outline how we’re working to use landing pages to make our primary tasks findable by our clients.