Cooking with Content Strategy: Where Drupal Meets Gouda

Posted by: Natalya Minkovsky, Director of Strategy & User Experience Aug 09, 2011 0 Comments

If you’ve heard me talk about content strategy before, you know I like to use food metaphors, specifically the culinary concept of “mise en place,” to explain why content strategy is essential.

At CapitalCamp, the DrupalCamp for Washington, DC, John Serrao and I expanded the idea into an interactive presentation called “Cooking with Content Strategy.”

John is Rock Creek’s technology manager, and we frequently work together on large website projects, many of them built on the Drupal content management system (CMS). We’ve found that there are several key intersection points in our work, and that’s what “Cooking with Content Strategy” is about.

Sketched in the spirit of Lean UX, the graphic below shows where strategy—user experience design, information architecture, and content—and CMS development intersect. Although these aren’t the only times when strategists and technologists collaborate, they are four critical junctures where collaboration is especially important.

What does adhering to this collaborative process achieve? Smoother site builds, happy site administrators, and improved front-end usability.

A few things about each of the intersection points we talked about at CapitalCamp:

• Card Sorting & Content Types. We put a lot of thought into content organization as part of the information architecture phase of the project, but using Drupal has encouraged us to start thinking about more of the details earlier on. Card sorting informs our information architecture decisions, which in turn inform the Drupal content types. The technologists and strategists work together to determine the attributes of each content type, not just how content will be grouped in the CMS.

• Content Templates & Backend Wireframes. Content templates (along with sample content and editorial style guides) ensure that writers deliver consistent, complete, and on-brand content. We’ve found that creating a content template for each Drupal content types works well. But once it’s written, where is that content going? That’s where backend wireframes come in. If you want happy site administrators, backend wireframes are a great tool. Synch up your content templates with your backend wireframes, and you’ve ensured that when it comes to adding content into the CMS, there are no surprises.

• Taxonomies. Metadata strategy, informed by client business objectives and user needs, needs to make sense on the development side as well. Rock Creek strategists and technologists work together to determine what Drupal taxonomies are needed, which taxonomies should be open and which should be closed, and what words will be most effective as taxonomy terms.

• Wireframes & Functional Specifications. Looking for a way to reduce documentation or to make your documentation more visual? It might not be feasible for your larger projects, but for smaller sites, we’ve found that annotating front-end wireframes with the functional specifications is helpful both to clients and developers. Clients are better able to connect the features and interactions with the way they will be built, while developers can check against the wireframes as they’re building the site without having to reference a second document.

For the presentation, we presented a concept for CheesyPlates.com—a site all about entertaining with cheese—and walked the attendees through some of the decisions and deliverables that went into creating the site. We also invited the attendees to participate in a hands-on card sort, organizing cheeses, beverages, and accompaniments to help generate the CheesyPlates.com information architecture.

Although it’s not quite the same without cheese and John in an apron, if you want to know more, check out the presentation on SlideShare (or above). The slides include examples of content strategy deliverables, backend wireframes, and front-end wireframes. Bonus: pictures of cheese.

Where have you found collaboration to be most essential? Which of the above intersection points would you want to know more about? Let us know in the comments.

Natalya Minkovsky

Director of Strategy & User Experience

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