Responsive Web Design, Part 1 (2015)

Content Choreography In RWD

Embracing Your Inner Content Strategist

You might notice that many of our questions and discussions are starting to roam outside the realm of development and implementation details. This is the nature of content strategy — we like to poke our noses in a lot of people’s business.

Being a content strategist doesn’t require you to stop being a designer, or a developer, or a project manager, or whatever your role is today. I truly believe that bad content makes it hard for you to do your job well, so when you’re working solo or on a project that doesn’t have a dedicated content strategist, block off some time early in the schedule to understand the current content situation. A full and robust content strategy includes a lot of information beyond a content model: voice and tone guidelines, style guides, editorial calendars, message architecture, and more. Not every project warrants all of those pieces, but I can’t think of a responsive site I’ve seen that didn’t benefit from structured content. The time spent figuring out underlying patterns, finding gaps and shortfalls, and planning for future maintenance will pay itself back before the site even launches.