Mindfly Website Design Studio

Looking for a content strategy fix? You came to the right place! After missing February's meetup, I was happy to attend the April gathering of Content Strategy: Seattle with nearly 50 other attendees. What prompted so many content strategists and content strategy enthusiasts to squeeze into Mama's Mexican Kitchen in Belltown?

Why, the presence of special guest Kristina Halvorson, the undisputed queen of Content Strategy, of course.

With Kristina was in town for An Event Apart, she agreed to join us for a "roundtable-ish Q&A session" with absolutely "NO POWERPOINT." She also brought Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering to give his two cents on how content strategy ties into website usability. And to remind us that "you can't stop people from sticking beans up their nose." I'll let you visualize that for a moment. Annnnnnnd...moving on.

Even with such a diverse group of attendees (web developers, writers, and even a carpenter) from organizations of all types and sizes (non-profits, single-person web shops, and at least one major Seattle-based coffee company), Kristina managed to provide great insight and guidance for all stages of content strategy.

Halfway through the Q&A, something quite surprising dawned on me. At this month's meeting, I thought, "Boy, a content strategy meetup is a lot like an AA meeting."

Or, at least, the depiction of AA meetings from TV and movies. I don't speak from personal experience.

First point of comparison? Each introduction began with a guilty iteration of something like "I'm Theresa and...I'm a Content Strategist," followed by a subdued chorus of "Hi, Theresa." Subsequently, the crowd would burst into uproarious laughter as we consumed our margaritas.

But the real similarity was Kristina's most repeated message of the night: Get a Sponsor.

If you're struggling to convince a client to invest in the content strategy process or arguing for the content audit of a current website before a redesign, go to someone above you in your company and get them on board. Get as many voices of support as you can. And if you're having trouble finding someone internally to take your side, use Kristina (and her book and tweets and blog posts) as your weapon.

Here are a few more content strategy gems that I took home from the night:

• If you can't sell content strategy to a client, call it something else. Figure out what they're willing to pay for and incorporate that into the early stages of the website design and development process. As Nick Finck of Blue Flavor pointed out, "We don't ask clients if they want web standards; we just give it to them."
• Consider the long-term price tag. If someone is frustrated, it's a problem. It doesn't matter if it's the customer who can't find the website's shopping cart, or the copy writer toiling away to fill the site with text; both parties can be valid indicators of a website's success. All the while, this frustration costs money for your client. Bring that point to the table, and clients will clamor for change with checkbooks in hand.
• Use fear and shame. Show your client what their competition is doing as motivation to start a website audit and to implement content strategy (see above).
• Technology won’t fix content. Using a content management system does not mean you have a content strategy; it's simply a tool that can help support the user experience. Don't let the constraints of your CMS dictate content.
• Start with a mobile design. Instead of trying to make a whole website fit onto a phone's tiny screen, evaluate "What's the main message we want to communicate on our mobile website?" and go from there. That information about content priorities will come in handy later when you expand to the full website design.
  

As Kristina charged, we are pioneers in the evolving practice of the content strategy movement. With more meetups in the future, we can keep Seattle (and the entire Pacific Northwest) on the forefront of content strategy. And we need to stop acting so guilty about it!

All the way back in 1842 an individual created an appended set of notes that included a detailed method for calculating Bernoulli numbers with Charles Babbage's Analytical Machine when translating a memoir of that device by Italian mathmatician Luigi Menabrea. For this reason, the individual became later known as the first computer programmer. Granted, this isn't exactly an accurate title for the person, but as they are recognized for creating the first algorithm intended to be processed by a machine, it is applicable enough and sounds much better than "Babbage Machiner".

This person was Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. Nowadays, she's almost always referred to as Ada Lovelace. Today, March 24th, is celebrated as Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. I joined in with blogging about the topic last year when I posted about the topic over at CSSquirrel, sharing the existence of the women who work at Mindfly Web Design Studio.

Conversations about gender representation issues in tech companies often float past without my awareness. This is because at Mindfly, women represent 60% of our talent. I suppose I'm fortunate that I can take their presence in the workplace for granted, but I know I shouldn't. Despite how much we congratulate ourselves on the progress of the 21st century, I'm informed that situations like Mindfly are the rarity.  I'm not entirely sure if efforts such as the new Barbie doll being a computer engineer is "progress" in that regards, frankly. While we're at it, I'm pretty sure most computer engineers aren't as color blind as she apparently is with that outfit.

The moral of the story is that if you are a woman in the tech industry, or know one, perhaps you should pause and take a moment to blog just a little bit about that. Doing so will help provide examples for girls to look towards when considering their own future. Then perhaps, some day, there can be more places like Mindfly.

In addition to all the awesome ladies that I shared with you in my previous posts, this Ada Lovelace Day there's an additional woman on the Mindfly team. Here's Erica, one of our designers. (Who rocks.)