More Than Just Lorem Ipsum: Content Knowledge Is Power

Content matters! Comp with real copy! Have a plan! By now, youve probably heard the refrain: making mobile work is hard if you dont consider your content. But content knowledge isnt just about ditching lorem ipsum in a couple of comps.

Countless organizations now have a decade or twos worth of Web content — content thats shoved somewhere underneath their redesigned-nine-times home page. Content thats stuck in the crannies of some sub-sub-subnavigation. Content thats clogging up a CMS with WYSIWYG-generated markup.

Messy, right? Well, not as messy as it will be — because legacy content is the thing that loves to rear its ugly head late in the game, breaking your design and becoming the bane of your existence.

But when you take the time to understand the content that already exists, not only will you be able to ensure that its supported in the new design, but youll actually make the entire design stronger because youll have realistic scenarios to design with and for — not to mention an opportunity to clean out the bad outdated muck before it obscures your sparkly new design.

Today, were going to make existing content work for you, not against you.

What You Dont Know Will Hurt You

When youre working on something new and fun, ignoring the deep recesses of content is tempting. After all, youve got a lot to think about already: designing for touch, dealing with ever-changing screen sizes, adding geolocation features, maybe even blinging things out with a few badges.

But if content parity matters to you (and it damn well should if you care one whit about the large and growing minority of Internet users who always or mostly access the Web on a mobile device), then at some point youll have to deal with the unruly content lurking underneath your websites neat surface.

Why? Because chances are therell be stuff out there that youve never thought about, much less designed for. And all that stuff has to go somewhere — too often, shoehorned into a layout it was never meant to inhabit, or perhaps not even migrated into a new template but instead left to wither in an outdated, mobile-unfriendly design.

Take navigation. As Brad Frost has written, designing small-screen navigation for small websites is simply tricky, any way you slice it.

Hard as it already is, it becomes downright impossible if you havent dealt with your legacy assets first. Youre sure to end up with problems, like a navigation system that only works for two levels of content when you actually have four levels to contend with, making all of that deeper information accessible only with hard to manage (and find) text links — or, worse, making it completely inaccessible except through search.

Theres a better way.

In The Belly Of The Beast

Mark Boulton has written eloquently on content-out design — the concept of determining how your design should shift for varying displays by focusing not on screen sizes, but on where your content naturally breaks down. Its excellent advice.

But if youre trying to work with a website with thousands of URLs — or anything more than a few dozen, really — you have to ask: Which content do I design with? Unless youre relying on infinite monkeys designing infinite layouts to create custom solutions for every single page, youre going to have to rely on representative content: a set of content that demonstrates the variety of information that the experience needs to support.

So, how do you know whats representative? You get your arms around the size, scope, structure and substance of your content.

Yup. Its time for the content audit.

People have been talking about content audits and inventories for more than a decade — in fact, Jeffrey Veen wrote about them on Adaptive Path back in 2002, calling them a mind-numbingly detailed odyssey through your web site. At the time, people were starting to yank their websites from static hand-coded pages and pull them into content management systems, and someone needed to sit down and sort it all out.

More than a decade later, Id say content audits are more useful than ever — but in a slightly different way. Today, a content audit isnt just an odyssey through your website; its a window into your contents nature.

What To Look For

You could audit content for all kinds of things, depending on what you want to learn and be able to do with the information. Some audits focus on brand and voice consistency, others on assessing quality or identifying ROT.

Theres nothing wrong — and quite a lot right — with these priorities. But if you want to ready your content to be more flexible and adaptable, then you cant just look at each page individually. You need to start finding patterns in the content.

Its a simple question, really: What are we publishing? If your first answer is a page, look again. Whats the shape of this content? What is this content most essentially? Is it an interview, a feature story, a product, a bio, a recipe, an erotic poem, a manifesto? Asking these questions will help you see the natural pieces and parts that make up the content.

When you do, youll have a structural model for the content that matches your users mental model — i.e. the way they perceive what theyre looking at and how they understand what it means.

For example, I recently worked with a large publicly traded company whose website dates back to the early aughts. After a couple of responsive microsites, theyve caught the bug and want to update everything. Problem is, the existing websites a mess of subdomains, redirects and thousands of pages that are nowhere near ready for flexible layouts.

Our first step was to dig deep, like a geologist — except that instead of unearthing strata of shale and sandstone marking bygone eras, we identified and documented all of the forgotten templates, lost content and abandoned initiatives we could.

We ended up with a dozen or so content types that fit pretty much anything the company was producing. Sure, we still ended up with some general pages. But more often than not, our audit revealed something more specific — and useful — about the contents nature. When it didnt, that was often a sign that the content wasnt serving a purpose — which put it on the fast track to retirement.

Once youve taken stock of what you have, gotten rid of the garbage and identified the patterns, youll also need to decide which attributes each content type needs to include: Do articles have date stamps? Does this need a byline? What about images? Features? Benefits? Timelines? Ingredients? Pull quotes? This will enable you to turn all of those old shapeless pages — blobs, as Karen McGrane has so affectionately labeled them — into a system of content thats defined and interconnected:

This content model shows attributes for the recipe content type, and how recipes fit into a broader system.

Each bit of structure you add gives you options: new abilities to control how and where content should be presented to best support its meaning and purpose.

Regardless of what you want to do with your content — launch a responsive website, publish to multiple websites simultaneously, extract snippets of content for the home page, reuse the content in an app, mash it up with a third partys content — this sort of structure will make it possible, because it enables you to pick and choose which bits should go where, when.

Tools for Auditing Content

The content audit may not be new, but some tools to help you get started are. Lately, Ive been running initial reports with the Content Analysis Tool (CAT), which, for a few bucks, produces a detailed report of every single page of content that its spiders can find across your website.

Using CATs Web interface, you can sift through the report and see details such as page types, titles, descriptions, images and even the content in <h1> tags — super-useful if youre assessing content of murky origin, because a headline often gives you at least a glimmer of what a page is about.

Heres an excerpt of what it found for Smashing Magazines own Guidelines for Mobile Web Developmentpage:

The CAT report shows a thumbnail of the page, as well as some data about its content. See the full screenshot for more.

While features such as screenshots of all pages and lists of links are useful for individual analysis, I prefer to export CATs reports into a big ol CSV file, where the raw data looks like this, with each row of the spreadsheet representing a single URL:

CAT also spits out detailed CSVs chockfull of raw data about all pages of a website. See the full screenshot for all of the fields.

Its not perfect. For example, if contents been abandoned and removed from navigation but left floating out there in the tubes, CAT typically wont pick it up either. And if a websites headlines arent marked up using <h1> (like Smashing Magazine, which uses <h2>s), then it wont scrape them either.

What it is great for, though, is getting a quick snapshot of an entire website. From here, I usually do the following:

• Add fields for my own needs, such as qualitative rankings or keep/delete notations;
• Set up filtering and sorting so that I can slice the data by whichever field I want, such as according to the section where its located;
• Assess and rank each page according to whatever qualitative attributes weve settled on;
• Note any patterns in the content types and structures used, as well as relationships to other content;
• Define suggested meta-data types and tags that the content should have;
• Use pivot tables, which summarize and sort data across multiple dimensions, to identify trends in the content.

With this, I now have both the detailed information to drive specific page-level changes and the high-level patterns to inform structural recommendations, CMS updates, meta-data schema and other efforts to improve content portability and flexibility.

I like using CAT because it was designed by and for content strategists — and improved features are rolling out all the time — but you can also use a similar tool from SEOmoz (although it tends to sell you on fancy-pants reporting features), or even grab a report from your CMS (depending on which one you use and how it collects information).

Any of these tools will help you quickly collect raw data. But remember that theyre just a head start. Nothing replaces putting your eyes — and brain — on the content.

The Secret To Scale

You dont have to love auditing content. You certainly dont need to develop a sick addiction to pivot tables (but its totally OK if you do). What you will love, I promise, is what a deep knowledge of content enables you to do: create an extensible design system that doesnt devolve at scale.

For example, lets look at some of the larger websites that have started using responsive design. Theres higher education, of course, where early adopters such as the University of Notre Dame were quickly followed by a rash of college websites.

What do most of these websites have in common? Two things: a lot of complex content and a responsive system that carries through to only a handful of pages, like the UCLAs website, where the home page and a few key pages are responsive, but the deeper content is not:

UCLAs home page is responsive, but most of the website, like this landing page, is not. Larger view.

Why doesnt that design go deeper? Id bet its because making a responsive website scale takes work, as Nishant Kothary summed up brilliantly in his story of Microsofts new responsive home page from late 2012:

“The Microsoft.com team built tools, guidelines, and processes to help localize everything from responsive images to responsive content into approximately 100 different markets They adapted their CMS to allow Content Strategists to program content on the site.”

In other words, a home page isnt just a home page. You have to change both your content and the jobs of the people who manage it to make it happen.

But one industry has had some luck in building responsively at scale: the media — including massive enterprises such as Time, People and, of course, the Boston Globe. These organizations manage as much or even more content than Microsoft and universities, but as publishers with a long history of creating professional, planned, organized content, they have a huge leg up: they know what they publish, whether its editorials or features or profiles or news briefs. Because of this, everything they publish fits into a system — making it much easier to apply responsive design patterns across all of their content.

Making Tough Choices

When you start breaking down your big, messy blobs of content and understanding how they really operate, youll realize theres always more you could do: add more structure, more editing, more CMS customization. It never ends.

Thats OK.

When you understand the realities of what youre dealing with, youre better equipped to prioritize what you do — and what you choose not to do. You can make smart trade-offs — like deciding how much time youre willing to invest now in order to have the flexibility to do more later, or what level of process change the current staff can handle versus the amount of flexibility you could use in the content.

There are no right answers. All we can do is find the right balance for each project, team and audience — and recognize that some structure is going to serve us a whole lot longer than none will.

Everyones Job

I get it. Going through endless reams of content aint your thing. Youre a designer, a developer, a project manager, damn it. You just want to get on with it, right?

We all do. But the more you seek to understand your content, the better your other work will be. The less often your project will go off the rails right around the time its supposed to launch. The fewer problems youll have with designs that break when real content gets inputted. The more the organization will be able to keep things in order after launch.

Best of all, the more your users will get the content they need — wherever and however they want it.

Thanks and credits go to Ricardo Gimenes, for preparing the front page image.

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Sara Wachter-Boettcher for Smashing Magazine, 2013.