Content Everywhere

Content Everywhere, on sale...everywhere

2012-12-12T12:00:00Z

Just in time for everyone's holiday wish list, Content Everywhere is available now!

Couldn't think of something for your nine-year-old niece? Fourth grade's the perfect time to learn about content modeling. Need a last-minute gift for your father-in-law? Nothing says "I love my spouse enough to put up with you" like a series of tips, tools, and techniques for wrangling digital content into something more flexible than endless pages and documents.

What? You don't want to give your family the gift of more sustainable, manageable, memorable content? Content that crosses devices and platforms? Content that's ready for mobile, and whatever's next? What sort of Scrooge are you, anyway?

After all, there's never going to be a better time to start tackling our content mess, breaking legacy assets down into pieces and parts, and giving them the structure and support to be displayed in lots of different places, lots of different ways.

If I've done my job, this book will help you do just that--and with loads of charming illustrations from Eva-Lotta Lamm, diagrams, examples, and anecdotes to help you see what others are doing and consider options for your own content.

I hope you pick up a copy of Content Everywhere, available right here on the Rosenfeld Media site. I can't wait to hear what you think.

Diagrams and other illustrations

2012-12-05T17:04:22Z

All 76 images for Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content (including front and back covers) are now available from the Rosenfeld Media Flickr site. We encourage you to grab and include them into your own presentations. But please be sure to mention where they come from: cite the book's title, the author's name, the publisher, date, and the book site's URL. Here's an example:

Figure 7.3 from Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content by Sara Wachter-Boettcher; Rosenfeld Media, 2012.
http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/content-everywhere/

Enjoy!

Frequently Asked Questions

2012-10-29T19:37:24Z

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.

What do you mean by structured content, and why is it so important?

Today, most digital content is unstructured: just words poured onto a page. To signify where one part ends and another begins, writers use formatting, like upping a font size to be a headline or putting an author's name in italics. This works fine if your content is only going to be used on a single page and viewed on a desktop monitor, but that's about it.

Structured content, on the other hand, is created in smaller modules, which can be stored and used in lots more ways. For example, you could display a headline and a copy teaser in one place, and have a user click to read the rest—something you can't do if the story is all one blob. You can give the same content different presentation rules when it's displayed on mobile, such as resizing headlines or changing which content is prioritized or emphasized—automatically. In this way, adding structure actually makes content more flexible, because it allows you to do more with it. You can learn about this in Chapter 5.

But don't I need different, simpler content for mobile?

If your content is needlessly complicated and full of fluff, then yes: Your content should be simplified for mobile—and for everywhere else, too. After all, a user with a desktop computer doesn't want to wade through filler either. But should your mobile users be offered "lite" versions of your content rather than the real deal? No.

While you might know what people do most often on their mobile devices, you can't know what they're intending to do on any specific visit. After all, people apply to college and buy cars on their phones every day—and will only do more on mobile as devices get more powerful and cheaper. Finally, I've seen firsthand how hard it can be for organizations to manage content on just one website. How much harder will it be when you're juggling updates and versions for multiple discrete experiences? There's no way you'll have the time, resources, and skills to keep up. One set of content that's clear, meaningful, and well structured is a more sustainable solution. You can read more about making this work in Chapters 9 and 10.

Who should be doing this work?

In the past, content modeling work was often just called data modeling, so it was done by database developers. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it has its problems. Because content can be much more ambiguous and conceptual than other sorts of data, it needs attention a developer alone is unlikely to give it. If you want content to communicate a message, tell a story, or do something specific for your organization or your users, then you need someone who understands what the content means and how it means it there when you're making content modeling decisions.

Oftentimes, the ideal person to play this role is a content strategist, editor, information architect, or user experience designer. The good news is, it's not either-or. Content modeling and structuring can and should be collaborative—something that's more effective when people from multiple perspectives are involved. In Chapters 3 and 4 of this book, I aim to show those who may not have been in those conversations in the past how to get started.

I'm a content person. Do I really need to understand the technical parts?

If you typically work in a creative, editorial, marketing, or branding role, then dealing with modular content, metadata, logic, and relationships might feel foreign. How does this relate to communicating a message or telling a story? Do you need to know how to build databases and APIs?

No, probably not. But here's the thing: If you're the one who understands the content best, and who knows what readers and users want from it, then you're exactly the right person to be thinking about how it should be structured, stored, and transported—so you can keep its meaning and purpose intact. While this doesn't mean you need to become an XML expert, it does mean you should get more comfortable with the ideas presented in Chapters 6 and 7, and be able to discuss needs, options, and priorities with those who will implement technical solutions.

Is this just about mobile?

Yes and no. Getting content ready for mobile is a big challenge, and spawning all sorts of debate: Do we give mobile users just a portion of our content, allowing them to "snack"? Do we go responsive? Build an app? What does mobile mean, anyway: Is a tablet a mobile device, or something else? As these questions are raised, it becomes more and more clear that what we need is content that can go onto all the devices that exist now—and those that will exist in the future.

Smartphones may be disrupting our assumptions today, but they're just the beginning. TVs, household appliances, cars, and more are becoming Internet-enabled. Plus, there are content-shifting services like Instapaper and content-plucking sites like Pinterest to contend with, as I explore in Chapter 11. It would be easy to get overwhelmed, but the good news is this: The work you do now, to structure content for reuse and get it ready for mobile, is going to also make that content more prepared for wherever the future takes it.

Testimonials

2012-10-29T19:25:08Z

"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

"A 'magic bullet' of a book—blasting into the dense body of emerging thought on cross-channel information architecture while also penetrating deeply into content strategy. The approaches it provides for 'weaponizing' content for multiple contexts and purposes comprise an essential pretext to achieving responsive Web design. Required reading. "
—Dan Klyn, co-founder, The Understanding Group

Content modeling: Making future-ready content possible

2012-04-23T13:00:00Z

Good news, y'all: after two months of research and writing and endless editing, I'm still excited about the future of content.

Even better, I've been talking with tons of smart internetters about the topic—and they've all got incredibly interesting things to say. What might surprise you, though, is that these interviews keep returning to the same topic: content modeling—the process of creating "micro" architectures that together form a piece of content.

If you trained as an information architect or technical writer, content modeling may seem far from futuristic to you—I mean, we've been modeling content for years, right? It's got a whole chapter in the Polar Bear Book.

So no, it's not new. It's not trendy. But with our new challenge of getting content prepared for an endless number of places, I think content modeling needs a hard second look—especially by the folks who are closest to the content itself.

Here's why. Just a few years back, content modeling was typically designed to drive contextual navigation—to create meaningful connections between information, allowing you to do things like systematically link the byline on an article to that writer's bio page, or show all articles by an author. That need hasn't gone away (and so many sites still haven't mastered this), but there's now a lot more that content modeling can give us.

Whether you're talking about personalized content, responsive design, or using an API to get your content on multiple apps, sites, and channels, your content's structure—and which sorts of structure it has—is what either limits or extends your ability to repurpose that content and make rules about where and when it should appear.

Today, I thought I'd share some of the tidbits I've gleaned from these interviews, with the hope of getting you as excited about content modeling as I am.

Whose job is content modeling?

Should content modeling be done by an IA? A content strategist? The CMS integration specialist? The database developer?

A content model is ultimately a data model—something that'll end up needing to be implemented in a relational database—but that doesn't mean it ought to start with the technical team. Instead, content models are the strongest and most useful when they map back to the content itself:

"I've always seen it as a role of the people who are most involved with the content. I know it bridges across—it bridges into information architecture, to the perspective of how we structure and retrieve content; it bridges user interface design because it's not enough to chunk up the content, we have to know what we're doing with that content... But someone has to truly understand the content, the customer, the device, the metadata."
— Ann Rockley, CEO of the Rockley Group and author of Managing Enterprise Content

What should be included in a content model?

Well, that depends on what you want the content to do now (we need content chunks A and B to flip below C for small screens), what you might want it to do in the future (content chunks A and B will be available on web-enabled toasters, but C won't make any sense there), and how much time and resources you can afford to spend on both:

"Modeling content is a never-ending battle between flexibility and complexity. The most complex model is the most flexible."
— Deane Barker, Partner at Blend Interactive

How does the CMS fit in?

When a content model is too complex or difficult to follow, it causes serious issues for those actually publishing and maintaining the content. In conversations with CMS experts and publishers alike, I've heard over and over the need for CMSes that make more sense for authors and editors—otherwise, we have no hope of them following them:

"If you make assigning a story to a section a complicated or unintuitive process, they won't do it. If you layer it in the right way, people get it. Our UX designers are involved with everything we do in the CMS."
— Patrick Cooper, Senior Product Manager for NPR Storytelling Tools

In other words:

"You give them something that's useful, then they start using it."
— Cleve Gibbon, CTO of Cognifide

Duh, right? People do better work when they're given better, more intuitive tools. Except, you see, that's not really how people think about CMSes:

"People think CMS is a soul mate—but it's more about how you treat it. Instead of finding 'the right' CMS, need to make it do what you want."
— John Eckman, Digital Strategist at ISITE Design

Experiments abound

Structure may be essential for getting content across lots of devices and channels, but there are plenty of people looking at alternate ways of building that structure.

Some are implementing CMSes where authors can edit in context, viewing a page of the website and simply clicking areas on that page to edit them. From there, the system extracts structure from the content based on the template used and the names of the editable areas.

Others are experimenting with things like markdown—a lightweight, readable way to add some structure to content that can be automatically translated into a variety of more substantial markup languages.

Thing is, no one's got the perfect answer, and there's likely never going to be a singular way to prepare content for every different situation. Solutions that don't require authors to think differently will have some limitations—but so will solutions that require lots of steps and granularity.

Here's where you come in. The more people like you—people who care about content and our users' experience with it—think about how content is organized, stored, and entered, the better our solutions will ultimately be.

Of course, you'll find much, much more on modeling content for this new world of connected devices and distributed publishing in the book, which I can't wait to share with you. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what you think: What's your role in content modeling? What do you think is important? Who should be doing it? What experiments have you tried?

Content Everywhere starts here.

2012-02-14T21:06:24Z

Hello, and welcome! Chances are, you're here because you're interested in the future of content (or, you're a friend or family member I've cajoled into visiting).

Either way, I'm so glad you stopped by. It's an exciting time to work with content.

Our users are visiting our web properties on increasingly diverse and portable devices, and expecting to do more once they get there—and the websites and applications we build are starting to keep up: responsive web designs that reshape to fit varied devices; read-it-later apps that allow us to shift content for future use; fresh content driven by a focused content strategy. Yet there's still much to be done.

New devices and channels will continue to emerge, and each one requires content—content that must come from somewhere. Too often, it's from spending even more: more time, more money, more of our already stretched-too-thin resources.

There's a better way.

Instead of keeping pace with endless demands for more content, we can begin to create content that's structured, flexible, and reusable—that can travel where our users need it, reshape to fit varied displays, and keep its heart intact all the while.

Like many of you, I'm not an expert in CMS technology, markup, or APIs. I come from content—writing it, editing it, planning it—with a heavy dose of IA and UX picked up over the years. I'm writing this book because I think decisions about how to structure, store, and share content have too often been left in solely technical hands: developers, IT departments, CMS vendors.

Instead, it's time we—the writers, strategists, architects, designers, and other assorted web workers of the world—reach beyond our comfort zones and join our technical teams in making decisions that affect our content's ability to thrive.

But that doesn't mean I have all the answers. In fact, I need your help:

Know of an organization that's future-readying its content well? I want to hear about it.
Preparing content for a responsive design or multiple device outputs? I'd love to know how you're approaching it—and what you've learned.
Think I'm missing something major? Tell me what I need to consider.

I'm pretty excited about this book, but I'd be even more excited to include stories of others who are grappling with these issues. So please do get in touch. I'd be delighted to hear what you think.

Events with Sara Wachter-Boettcher

2012-02-13T14:36:04Z

Upcoming Appearances and Presentations

Past Appearances and Presentations

2012-02-07T18:02:10Z

Part One: The Case for Content Everywhere

Chapter 1: Framing the New Content Challenge

Chapter 2: Building a Way Forward

Part Two: The Elements of Content

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

Part Three: Putting Structured Content to Work

Chapter 8: Findable Content

Chapter 9: Adaptable Content

Chapter 10: Reusable Content

Chapter 11: Transportable Content

Part Four: Enduring Content

Chapter 12: Content and Change

Chapter 13: Towards a New (Information) Architecture

About the Author

2012-02-07T17:45:32Z

Sara Wachter-Boettcher is an independent content strategist based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where she helps clients stop creating endless content and start building strategies that are sustainable, meaningful, and future-ready.

She got this way after stints as a journalist, copywriter, and web writer, during which she became increasingly dissatisfied with the chaos typically found in web content projects. In 2008, she launched the content strategy practice at her past agency, Off Madison Ave, and started working closely with IA and UX teams to build a better way forward.

Sara is the editor in chief for A List Apart magazine, where her writing has also appeared. She also contributes to Contents and blogs sporadically on her personal site, sarawb.com. You can see where she'll be speaking next on Lanyrd.

Home Page

2012-02-06T16:35:46Z

Care about content? Better copy isn't enough. As devices and channels multiply—and as users expect to easily relate, share, and shift information—we need content that can go more places, more easily.

This book will help you stop creating fixed, single-purpose content and start making it more future-ready, flexible, and reusable by showing you how to:

Identify content's micro elements
Structure it in meaningful ways
Bring it to life through metadata and markup

This gives us content that's findable, adaptable, connectable, and transportable—allowing us to better manage it, and retain its meaning, in an unfixed web.

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2012-02-06T16:34:34Z

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2012-02-06T16:30:12Z

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