 Okay, how's everybody doing? We still awake everybody stand up up up up everybody up Hey There we go. Let's wake up a little take a big breath in raise your hands over your head Exhale it out through your mouth really loud and one more time come on inhale let it out Great, okay, you may see I am going to talk today about creating alignment with core modeling and this really Is is was a great setup all day as people were talking about? Using your your content to serve the visitors of your website really thinking through your content that it's not an afterthought Core modeling is one way for that. We can get there So here's a lovely family Whoops, that was good. Where are we? Okay? We have a growing family here, right? They are looking to buy a new house So the first thing they do is pick out the paint colors and then they pick out the curtains and all the furniture Yes No No, first thing they do is Figure out what their family needs This is their first home. What features do they need? What do they need for the kids to grow up? What do they need for their own private space? They're not decorating the house before they pick out the house They're figuring out what will function well for them When we start by designing a home page and an architecture and then kind of work our way down It's like picking out the color of the house before we know what it is. We're doing so Core modeling is about taking the architecture and the layout and the design and Putting it in its proper place, which is after we figure out exactly what it is. We're trying to build So I have a lot of experience in a ton of different things that have nothing to do with each other Um, so I work at sleight of hand studios. We're a digital agency outside Washington, DC So I've spent most of my career in tech I'm also a wine educator and I'm also a yogi and When you're a yogi what you try to do is align things You're aligning the body and then you're aligning what you're doing with the body with your breath So what we're gonna do is talk about the core model as a method of alignment Okay, what we're trying to do is align the business goals that we have for our website With the user tasks that need to be accomplished on that site And we're trying to find that alignment that crossover between those two things The project then Revolves around the core content It doesn't revolve around what the homepage looks like it doesn't revolve around the design It doesn't even revolve around the architecture that somebody has very Handily handed you when you walked in the room We all have those those days where are you starting a new project and someone says this is what we wanted to look like Okay, we're gonna try to back people up and start thinking about the most important pages on your website and By doing this we're going to create Better content and we're gonna create better architecture in the long run Because we're gonna understand the interaction between the content and the users between the content and the business Okay, we're gonna drive our visitors to really highly optimized webpages And what happens when they get to a highly optimized web page? They're gonna read it. They're gonna act on it And then that is going to benefit the organization who owns that website through greater ROI So increased ROI through increased conversions through more optimized webpages So if you have Been to any of my other sessions on content strategy over the past few years you always see this slide Because this is what I preach Everybody has to be involved in the project So even though we're talking content we've got Social media people sitting here. We've got developers. We've got designers. We've got subject matter experts SEO folks architects Why is everybody sitting here? So you're gonna walk into this meeting and all these people are gonna be here and everyone's like I don't know why I should be in this meeting. You know, why am I here? Okay, what we want is stakeholders across all the disciplines to come together and to collaborate and with the development team Okay, and brainstorm What we want to talk about are the business goals here. We're doing our discovery You cannot do a content redesign without doing a discovery So the first part of our discovery is brainstorming on what your organization's overall goals are What do we want for this website? Which is usually a little bit different than what is our organization doing in general? what is our goal for this particular website and Really think about prioritizing them making them measurable going down to sub goals What are we really trying to accomplish? So we're doing this brainstorming activity with all of these people just to identify our business goals. That's step one Second brainstorming session what do our visitors want? We can guess and we can assume and sometimes if you have a new site You're doing a lot of guessing and assuming But if you have an existing site, you've got metrics You've got task surveys. You've got analytics You can do a thorough content audit And you can figure out what is it that our audience needs to get accomplished because all four of these audiences Have totally different needs Hey, so We've got our business goals and we've got our audience objectives What are the cores at? What point does the business goal and the user task align? So we're taking the same team of people and we're figuring out where this alignment is in our content Hey, do we have pages that align? At least one business goal and at least one user task Okay So I've got a task and at least one go business goal and they come together. That's called a core okay, so this is our overlap and This is where you may or may not currently have a page that does this because you're thinking differently now You're not thinking in terms of departments or products You're thinking in terms of where are my visitors going and what do we need as an organization for them to do when they get there? So now we're going to take all these people who have been working on this Get them to do this alignment and Then send them into a workshop and Probably several sessions of a workshop because you can't do this for more than four hours at a time Okay, so you're going to divide your group into teams of two people and They're going to be from two different disciplines So if you can match up a person who's a subject matter expert with a person who is a developer or designer That's great opportunity right there for them to start to speak at the same in the same way about the project and Each one is going to work on the same core So everyone in the room if you have four teams, you're all working on exactly the same core And you're going to put these these ideas down and I'll show you how to do that And then you're going to compare across teams. So you're going to get some synergy between the teams and Anyone who has a vested interest in this website should be available to do this workshop So here is the page if you've ever seen anything about the core model, this is the form You Google it no matter who has written about the core model. This is the form So the first thing we do is put down what is the core page that we're working on and so in my example here this is a project that we had done for an association where they wanted to build out a new website where people can come and identify Health education programs throughout the US so the university crowdsourced the data from universities and then students come in and look for Look for programs that align with what they want So this is the program detail page that we're showing here and the first thing we do First thing we do is say what is the user task for this core? So for this one we want to look at a particular program offering Then we document what's the business goal that this page is going to accomplish So in this case, it's creating visibility for the universities that are participating in this website Our next step then is to come up with the inward paths. How are we getting people to this page? Now you might have existing metrics to support that You might have a marketing strategy that's going to support that but you can see for this particular page The home page isn't taking me there I'm getting it from a program search. Maybe a Google search Maybe some newsletters going out from the universities or Twitter feeds So those are the inward paths to this content Now we're starting to see architecture, right? Starting to build architecture without those big flow diagrams without site maps The next thing we come up with is what are our forward paths? Where do we want to take them next and we get a little selfish here? Because we are the organization who owns the website So we get to decide where to take them next to fully satisfy Additional business goals of ours. So here we're going to either let them contact the program Learn more about the program. Oh, maybe learn about accreditation for the program Search for more programs if this one didn't meet their needs Finally We say, okay. We've kind of got a nice flow here. We know how we're getting to the page We know where we're going from the page. So here's the start of our architecture and now we're going to prioritize our content and This could be a drawing. It could be a list of fields It could pretty much be whatever each team comes up with because once they start collaborating This is going to change a little bit But you can see it's a small box because we're trying to say hey, this is mobile first also What are the most important things? Prioritize how you want this content displayed to your visitors? Okay, so now we've done the inward paths the forward paths We've got our core content and we've thought mobile This is a thinking tool That has changed the way we have approached building a new website We often want people to change We say, how do I convince somebody? How do I go in the room and say we need to follow this core modeling? Methodology the way you change is to change yourself first Get acclimated to this read as much as you can about it learn some more about it and just start trying it out If you change yourself, then you can change the world one website at a time Thank you. All right So if you're like me you might not have gotten a picture of that diagram that she had up there So I'm gonna have her put the diagram up for one more second So you can take a picture and then a Scott delay is our closing keynote and he just arrived So we'll have him get started, but just in case you want to take a picture of that last diagram Dory is also going to stay here for the Reception so if you have more questions for her, she'll be around and available One second We'll get started in a minute. We are actually gonna have an interactive session. It's late in the day You've been having a lot of content coming at you. We only have a half hour So we're gonna we're actually gonna interact sound good. That's some fun Watch some conversation going amongst people. You know if you want to come up front Literally, it's 30 minutes. Just come on up a little bit easy a little bit easier to hear each other And I won't have to yell so yeah, I encourage you to come on up towards the front and we'll get started in a minute