ARTS & FARCES internet

Erin Kissane has written a stellar second article, “Content templates to the rescue,” for A List Apart in what hopefully is a continuing series. Her first article in the series, “Writing content that works for a living” was also useful for those of us who wrangle content on the editorial side of the web.

The core problem in large organizations—or small organizations with large websites—is getting knowledge from the experts to the editors and writers responsible for publishing the content on the web. Experts are rarely excellent writers, are often “too busy” to work on something as lowly as web copy, or simply don’t understand why excellent content on the web matters.

Kissane provides a roadmap to getting successful content in such situations:

1. Assign a content lead to manage the knowledge transfer from the experts to the writers.
2. Most importantly, give the content lead the authority necessary to manage the transfer. As Kissane writes, “If the leaders of your organization (or your client’s organization) make it clear that our content lead’s requests are high priority, the work often magically gets done.” Yeah, magically.
3. Define a content workflow as early as possible. It’s important that this happen in the very earliest stages possible.
4. Use the right tools to manage a website’s content.

Kissane’s article mostly focuses on this last step, outlining the use of content templates to manage content—I’ve used them for years, but have always called them page tables. A content template (or page table) is a simplified paragraph-level analog to the website’s wireframes. Kissane’s content templates contain the page title, a brief description of each piece of content on the page, and examples of each piece of information.

My page tables are the same basic idea as Kissane’s content templates but contain more information: the page number and title, the source of the content, the project phase, the content owner, the scope, a prioritization of the content and associated assets, how the content will be formatted (paragraph, nested bulleted list, table, etc.), a thumbnail of the associated template, content creation implications (e.g., a .pdf linked from the page must be updated each month), maintenance implications, technology implications, and outstanding questions and associated risks.

Example of a page table.

I don’t include examples of each piece of information. After reading Kissane’s article, I think she makes a good case for inclusion of examples, and I’d like to include them in my page tables, but it would force the document to go longer than a single page. The whole idea of a page table is brevity—it must fit on one side of a single page.

Content templates work best when used for an entire class of pages where information should be presented consistently. In these cases, a single page table is enough for each class of pages. In the case of standalone pages, each of these have their own page table.

It’s important that content templates follow a complete content inventory in the content workflow. You have to know what needs to be written before you can know how you’re going to write it.

Here’s Kissane’s nut graf:

“Content templates are usually created by content strategists, but if your project doesn’t have a dedicated content specialist, the templates can produced by information architect, project coordinator, or other person who is in charge of your content. (If no one is currently in charge of your content, you have bigger problems and should put this article down and go hire, assign, or persuade someone to oversee content for your site.)”