Content Everywhere
Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content
Care about content? Better copy isn’t enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to relate, share, and shift information quickly—we need content that can go more places, more easily. Content Everywhere will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.
Care about content? Better copy isn’t enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to relate, share, and shift information quickly—we need content that can go more places, more easily. Content Everywhere will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable, and meaningful wherever it needs to go.
Testimonials
The Web has moved beyond the desktop, and our content must follow. Through a broad perspective, clear language, and an army of practical suggestions, Sara Wachter-Boettcher guides us through the challenges we face.
Ethan Marcotte, author, Responsive Web Design
The book you’re holding is magic. It cuts through all the noise surrounding structured content and offers immediately useful ways to turn your content from a bunch of scattered pages into a strong, flexible mesh that’s ready for countless new uses. And the best part? Wachter-Boettcher walks you through all the reasoning and all the sub-steps of this process without ever losing sight of the real goal: to create and maintain lively, useful content for human beings. If you’re looking for a lucid guide to the new challenges content publishers face, you won’t find a better one than this.
Erin Kissane, author, The Elements of Content Strategy, and editor, Contents
Website, app, social media—and more. Large screen, tablet, smartphone—and more. Are you writing and rewriting for all these different channels and devices? Stop. Get this book. Sara Wachter-Boettcher gives you practical advice in an easy-to-read style with lots of examples. She’ll help you write once, structuring your content to be successful wherever and however it appears.
Janice (Ginny) Redish, author, Letting Go of the Words-Writing Web Content that Works
Accessible, actionable, compelling: If that’s how you want your content, that’s also the perspective you want in a context-friendly content strategy. In Content Everywhere, Sara Wachter-Boettcher arms you with insight and courage for the content you confront—and the contexts we cannot yet imagine.
Margot Bloomstein, author, Content Strategy at Work, and principal, Appropriate, Inc.
OMG, so that’s what I’ve been doing these years! You know that unexplainable part where I divine order from the chaos of an existing site? Well, Sara makes it systematic, repeatable, and frankly better than anything I ever did. And if I didn’t find this book so damn useful, I’m pretty sure I’d hate her for it.
Jason Grigsby, author, Head First Mobile Web, and founder, Cloud Four
This book is about a topic very near to my heart: creating flexible content that can be published wherever you need it. If you’re making content with a single destination in mind, you’re wasting a lot of time. You should stop, read this book, and rethink the way you think about content.
Rachel Lovinger, Content Strategy Director, Razorfish, and author, The Nimble Report
Table of Contents
Foreword by Kristina Halvorson
Chapter 1: Framing the New Content Challenge
Chapter 2: Building a Way Forward
Chapter 3: Breaking Content Down
Chapter 4: Creating Content Models
Chapter 5: Designing Content Systems
Chapter 6: Understanding Markup
Chapter 7: Making Sense of Content APIs
Chapter 8: Findable Content
Chapter 9: Adaptable Content
Chapter 10: Reusable Content
Chapter 11: Transportable Content
Chapter 12: Content and Change
Chapter 13: Towards a New (Information) Architecture
FAQ
These common questions and their short answers are taken from Sara Wachter-Boettcher’s book Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content. You can find longer answers to each in your copy of the book, either printed or digital version.
- What do you mean by “content everywhere”?
The way I talk about it, “content everywhere” doesn’t mean splattering your message in every corner of the Web. It’s about investing in content that’s flexible enough to go wherever you need it: multiple websites, apps, channels, and other experiences. Why? Because devices of all shapes, sizes, and capabilities are flooding the market, and users expect to get your content on all of them, which you can read about in Chapter 1.Right now, most organizations can barely keep up with their large, unwieldy desktop websites, much less multiple different sets of content for all these different experiences. Content everywhere is all about learning how to prepare one set of content to go wherever it’s needed—now and in the future.
