 Okay, I know everybody's still filtering in, but it's 10.45, and just for the sake of time, I wanna go ahead and get started. How was the keynote? I missed it, I was preparing for this, so. I'll have to follow it on Twitter later. So thank you all for coming to my session. It's called Don't Let Crappy Content Ruin Your New Site. And my name is Nika Lorber, and I am the Creative Director at Chapter 3. And I wanted to just talk to you a little bit about my background for this talk, because it's relevant to you guys for a few reasons. This talk is about content, and I'm a designer, and I would not say that I have a writing background. But over the last several years, I've noticed that a lot of my clients are just really having a lot of problems with content. And so as we provide solutions for our clients, I'm always looking for opportunities to basically just find the area where we can really add value, and content seems to be a major problem. So I wanna just talk a little bit about something that I'm passionate about, which is essentially what creates an amazing website. And I see this as three key pillars. We've got beautiful design, rock solid development, and meaningful content. And in our industry over the last 10 years, there was a time when companies were willing to pay for development, but they weren't willing to pay for design. And then over time, essentially, they started to see the business value in paying for design. So that's happened in the last 20 years. So companies are now like, okay, I'll pay for development, I'll pay for design. But they're not willing to pay for content. And I think this is for a few different reasons. One of the reasons is that we all know how to write. So when you go to create a website, you always think content is something you just kinda like shoehorn in there afterwards, because anybody in the office can do it. A lot of times it gets relegated to maybe the secretary and our office manager, or we'll just use the same old crappy content that we already have and put it in the new site and it's gonna be, it's all gonna work. But I think that this is like a real, it's a serious problem. And people are really, really missing the boat here. I mean, I work with clients all the time where they come to me and they want a new website and they kind of have this fantasy like, oh, we're gonna sprinkle this development and design dust on everything and it's just gonna magically be amazing. And the reality is sometimes I look at these sites and I just tell them, I'm like, if you guys just edit your copy and think about who your audience is, you can actually save money and get kind of like me that your goal is a lot easier. The main problem is that businesses are, so we use the house analogy a lot at chapter three. So building a website is like building a house. And so you can think of the structure of the house as the development and maybe like the paint and your landscaping as the design. And content is in a lot of ways, like I think of it as the upkeep. And so the problem is that, we work for a lot of businesses where they come to us and they've got like a new marketing director. And that new marketing director is gonna make their stand by saying, you know what, like we're gonna redesign the site. We're gonna get a new technology. We're gonna get new design and it's gonna be amazing and everybody gets excited. And it's a sexy thing. You know, it's like, it boosts company morale. People are excited. They feel like they have something fresh. And it's fun. But then there's like this ongoing maintenance issue. And the maintenance is like the plumbing. It's like, oh, I've gotta get my gutters fixed. It's like fixing your gutters is not sexy. But your house is gonna like look like this if you don't continually nurture it and repaint it and buy new furniture when the couch wears out or whatever. You know, add new landscaping. And so, you know, there's just, businesses are really, they're diminishing this initial investment. Like there's a monetary problem here. Or like, I mean, they'll spend like 60 grand on a website and then the content, they'll just be like, yeah, whatever. So it's a real lost opportunity. And I see the solution as three things. And I wanna, you really use this talk. I wanted to share with you guys that we don't have all the solutions. And the solutions are sort of like, they're in three different areas. And those areas are resourcing, education, and planning. And I actually believe that there's like a gap. There, and the biggest gap is like in the resourcing issue. And part of this is because people massively underestimate how much time and energy and knowledge it takes to do really good content. So I've been doing Drupal for like 10 years now and I do it in a design and strategy capacity. And when I first started in this industry, I had this nagging suspicion like, like I never knew enough, you know? Like I would go to work and I used to always hear words like marketing and like SEO and design and development. And like there's just this really super long list of skills that I always felt like they fell on me like I had to understand all of them. And this is the list. It's like to really run a website. You have to be a writer. You have to be a designer. You have to understand UX. You have to know a little bit about SEO and you have to understand like how to admin your Drupal site. You have to know how to look at Google Analytics and say, okay, this page on our site is getting the most traffic. Like that kind of says something about our users. You know, what do we do with that information? You have to understand how to leverage the web to meet your digital strategy for your business or your organization. And you have to understand a little bit about marketing and social media. You know, it's like, how are you getting people to your website? You have to understand how the information is organized and how to manage just like the ongoing maintenance of your website. And it helps to know a little bit of code too. I mean, it's like, I don't call myself, I'm not a developer, but it's like, I have to know a certain amount of HTML just to be in this space. And this list, like, so I've been doing this for 10 years now and just last year I would say I got to the point where I felt like I knew enough. It was after I went to like some SEO conferences. I've been to like some future insights conference and I was finally like, okay, I feel like I've gained this broad enough knowledge to think about the content and just think about how websites foster businesses and how they support a business. But the biggest problem in our industry right now is that people who get tasked with maintaining a site usually fall into two categories. So one of them will have a skill set that looks like this, where you know how to admin Drupal, you probably know how to look at Google Analytics. You probably have some PM skills and you have some HTML chops. And this person is generally called a webmaster. Now, I was just talking to one of my clients who essentially has this title last week and I was kind of sharing with him that I was gonna give this talk. And he's like, yeah, people like ask me to fix the printer and they think that I'm just like this, you know, this tech monkey that just is like, you know, do this webmaster. It's like that title is problematic and it's problematic from a political standpoint because a lot of you in this room have probably witnessed this where, like if somebody has that title, it's kind of a, it's not a very glorious title. It sucks. It's like that person, for instance, if that person with the title of webmaster goes to a C level decision maker and says, hey, C level decision maker, like we might need to rethink the content because, you know, the analytics say this and whatever, and like I see this all the time where because of that title, people don't take that person seriously and that person is on the ground, like they know a lot, but it's a little bit of a, yeah, I mean it's like a political issue and it's a title issue. And then like on the other spectrum of this are people that have these skill sets and so maybe you're a writer, you're a marketer, you might have like some actual background in doing marketing and maybe it's not even related to the web. And the problem I see most often with these folks is that they say, I'm not technical and they wear that like a badge of honor. Those people are gonna lose their jobs eventually. Like that is not a good thing in today's digital economy. You know, those people have to become technical. You have to reach out and like embrace this cross-disciplinary skill set that is totally necessary for us to truly make great websites. And so I believe that content needs a champion. I was trying to find like a better graphic than this by the way I was trying to come up with something that really said champion, but this is what you guys get, I'm sorry. I think the underlying quality in this individual who does this position is curiosity. So in our industry, anybody who claims to be an expert has just been doing it like a year longer than somebody else. We're in an industry where it changes every year and we're always growing and striving. And so that quality of being curious is like fundamental to figuring out how to make a website work for your business and your organization. And you basically have to say, okay, I don't know anything about SEO, but I'm willing to read a blog about it or learn about it and then figure out what to do with that information. Cause if you don't, you're not appreciating the fact that the web is just this, all these things are crossing. It's not just one skill set. And it's tough cause it takes a long time to learn all this stuff, but at least if you have that willingness, that gets you most of the way. Whenever we go to hire folks at chapter three, we're always just that willingness to learn is almost all it takes. So I feel like we need a new position and I don't know what it's called. We have something called content strategy. We have things called marketers, we have things called developers and stuff, but I don't, I'm putting this out there as a question. I feel like there needs to be like a content director, but even that kind of fails to truly encapsulate like what this person does. I'm actually doing this job at chapter three for our website. Like I am the chapter three website champion. And I don't do everything on it. It's more like I orchestrate it. I make sure that my design team, they're helping do the design. I reach out to other people to help me with content and I'm always reaching out to everyone in the office, but it's like I say this is my website. And whoever does get, if we come up with this like fantasy position, this person should get paid a lot of money because it's an important position. It's like I see businesses all the time. It's like that webmaster or that like marketing coordinator, it's like those guys aren't getting paid as much and they're probably like the heart and soul of the website, which increasingly is the heart and soul of your business. That's not like a website is no longer like a nice to have. I mean, more and more businesses, it's like the web is the first and the foremost place that people come to you. They don't even ever meet you in person. They don't like that, that's it. So some ideas I have about solving this are, that's my fantasy, so I put it out to all of you guys if you have ideas or really great titles that we can like invent a new title. But in the meantime, there are ways that we can make improvements. So whether you guys are working on the agency level, advising other people or maybe you help an in-house team, one thing I've learned from redesigning the chapter three website is that we just invested in in-house talent. So for instance, one of our project managers used to write for Ski Magazine. And I was like, can you help me edit this? Cause I make, I'm like not a great writer. I make typos, but the one thing is I write really briefly, like I was a terrible writer in high school, that person that like triple spaced everything and put margins in and like, which is perfect for the web cause nobody reads. So we invested in some of our own in-house talent and I can say that that's like a positive thing. I've tried to hire outside writers and sometimes I run into the issue where they don't understand the knowledge, like our Drupal well enough. So getting people who are actually on the ground to help with the content is really beneficial. Another thing is just like making sure those folks stick around and can continue to help you. So the next thing I want to talk about is education and this is probably like the meat of this talk. And I'm going to share with you stuff that you're going to be able to take away and use immediately. And again, feel free to, I wrote a blog about this and so I'll show you that a little bit later and you guys can reference that and use it. So I want to start a little bit about just talking about what content is. So content is your navigation. It's the number of your navigation items, it's the depth of your navigation and it's the length of your titles. It's also the copy on your website but it's not just the copy, it's the tone, it's the formatting or lack thereof in this example. It's the length, it's your images. The quality of those images, the consistency of those images and the size of those images from a speed standpoint when a user comes to your site and your site either loads fast or slow. It's also the graphics on your website, the quality of those graphics, the consistency and the iconography. It's also the taxonomy and again it's the length of the terms, the quality of the terms, the quantity of the terms. And it's your videos. And again the quality of the videos, the length and the relevance. And when all of these things come together, they affect two key things on your site. They affect the usability of your site and they affect the speed. So all of these things matter and they all interconnect. So when we ask ourselves what is crappy content, it's really just three things. It's something that's not curated for the web. It's something that decreases usability and it's something that doesn't meet your site goals. So I wanna talk a little bit about writing for the web and there's a lot of information out there on this but I helped a client, California College of the Arts this last year with some of their content and I wrote a blog after working with them and a lot of this is captured there so if you guys don't wanna take notes you can just go to that URL afterwards. So the first thing, so I created a guideline for this college and this is some of the things I put in there. So we ask ourselves like why would you write differently for the web? The number one reason is that people read slower on screen so they read 20% slower and they're task focused. So when you read a book or a newspaper you're looking for an immersive experience but when you're on the web you're scanning, you're task focused, you're skipping around. And people consume content in what's called an F-shaped pattern on the web which means that if you look at a website they're gonna focus more at the top and more on the left hand side of the screen. So as they kinda go down they actually, they've shown, these are heat maps that are tracking people's eye movements. As you go down the page they're actually going less and less to the right and they're just scanning like the beginning of paragraphs. So if we accept that this is the common behavior then the question becomes well how do we change our content to adapt to this fact? And there's some really easy things. So the first one is that it helps to have some intro text that's a little bit larger. So this is an example from Berkeley where they have a title at the top and then they have that italic paragraph is kinda in my style guide I'll call that like p.big or something of that sort where it's kinda like an intro paragraph that you might see in a news article that's slightly larger and the purpose of that is that it draws the reader in and allows you to focus on that and then if you find that that content has something that you're interested in you can then go further down the page. A second thing is just breaking up your content with headers and this is pretty intuitive and pretty obvious but a lot of times folks don't do this. And the third one is just understanding the fact that people since their eyes are mostly on the left hand side of the screen what does that mean for the actual words? Well, what are those first two words gonna be are they gonna be some like passive intro welcome to blah blah blah it's like nobody cares. Get to the point within like the first two words of your headers and make those first two words as descriptive as possible because you're maximizing the effectiveness of your communication that way. This is called the inverse pyramid and this is from journalism and this also segues nicely into the F shape pattern in the sense that you put your most important content on top followed by supporting details and then finish with related content. So I wanna talk a little bit about length. This is something that kind of comes up. I would say in general keep your information short and bite sized but I do wanna also just kind of again this is where we get into other larger questions like well what about SEO? So it is true that pages that have longer content have more words and therefore can potentially rank higher. So that is a fact. So but at the same time that doesn't mean that you should make your content long just for SEO purposes. Google has continuously been improving their ability to rank valuable content higher regardless of like there's a lot of talk about this out there whether how much where we are with this but essentially the idea is that in the long term Google will only rank content that's really high quality regardless of length but there's still some truth today that length does affect SEO. If you're ever working on creating guidelines for maybe some clients or internally you can create some guidelines like I did this for CCA. It really depends on the design itself so you have to look at the design and sort of ask yourself what is the font, how what's the font size, what are your column widths and so I wouldn't copy this specifically but you can use this as like a template if you wanna give those kind of guidelines to some of your content creators. So when I was working with CCA I learned a ton about writing so this is part of why I've become like so passionate about this and cause I collaborated with this guy Jim Narina and he sent me to find all of these great web articles that taught you how to avoid basically to write more concisely and do things like avoiding redundant phrases and this stuff to me was just like it completely blew my mind because it affected me so much to the point that when people would start to talk to me and they would use too many words to describe something I'd be like make it shorter you're like you're using too much just get to the point cause a lot of things end result it's like you just say result or advanced notice you just say notice these things mean the same thing you can cut a lot of unnecessary words just by realizing that they're saying the same thing and then writing concisely just kind of goes hand in hand with that so if you can analyze your own writing on your site I guarantee you any of you that maintain websites you'll be able to cut a lot of content just by trying to look for things that can be pared down so for instance something like despite the fact that which is something we might say all the time you can just say even or though it can be truncated into a smaller word or in the event that can be just changed to if and those small changes really add up over time cause when you create shorter copy it makes your site a lot more usable another thing to consider in the content arena is a syndrome known as banner blindness so because advertising has primarily used the right hand rail to show ads as users we've basically ignore that and so I went to a usability conference last year with the Norman Nielsen group those guys are essentially like the forefront of usability specialists in our field and the main takeaway was just like old school web design that's super simplistic like this still is king so if you're ever trying to create calls to action on a given page and you know somebody internally is like I wanna create like this beautiful internal graphic you can do that and it will probably get less clicks than something like this because even if you make it look like your website people just they won't see it as much as they'll see something that's simplistic and text based so I've been advising my clients more and more just to go with a minimalist approach like this and it also helps because it's like it's easier and faster to create so one of the most important things in this talk that I wanna share with you is this right here is whenever you guys go to create any content you should always ask yourself first what is the communication goal of a page who's my audience and what are the key calls to action and even on the most static page you're gonna be able to answer these questions for those who have existing websites and who aren't creating content from scratch I would add three more goals which is this is more targeted towards editing those are what is the utilitarian function of this page can content be made shorter or more skimmable and can redundant content be eliminated because a lot of clients that I work with like I said they come to me with pages that are just too long and if they were to just ask themselves these three questions and look at some of their content they're gonna be able to cut it down by a lot so I was up last night preparing for this and I was looking at the DrupalCon website and I was like oh, we'll use that as an example so this is a blog that's on the homepage of the DrupalCon website right now and the blog is titled DrupalCon North America Kicks Off in Austin and I would say that the goal of this blog is to showcase highlights for the upcoming conference that we're all at and the target audience is all of us as attendees now I noticed that they succeeded in creating pretty reasonable paragraph lengths and the content was relevant but the one area that they really failed in was calls to action because remember like I said earlier the web is about achieving a task it's like I know this is really great and we're all happy to be here but at the end of the day like you know if I'm looking at this page and they talk about Dries's keynote I want to go to that keynote and they didn't create any links for those things and even something as simple as a link is a call to action you know because that's how we use the web it's interactive so I went ahead and I did an example of how I would make this blog better if I were writing it and you can do really, really minimalist things so for instance I bolded the text at the top that says more than 3,300 people because that's kind of an interesting stat you know it's like that's a large number of people that are here at the conference I added links for all of the events that looked kind of like they could be linkable and then there was this big paragraph at the bottom that talked all about Drupal 8 which is a very exciting thing for us as a Drupal community but there was no actionable links so I just made them a bolded list and I made them actionable links so you guys can see with just these very small changes you can turn even something as simple as a blog into something that's more effective to meet your goals the other thing is that this makes me super happy so I'm always reading these blogs about like the latest usability studies and essentially it's totally okay to break grammar rules on the web because it again people just skim they don't necessarily read so you can use things like numbers instead of spelling them out paragraphs don't have to be three to five sentences and you can use sentence fragments if you're using headers and things like that so how many of you work with clients that struggle with sourcing imagery? Same here so and again this is that thing where it's like all of you guys probably don't say I'm a photographer like I don't self-identify as a photographer and your clients probably think the same but how many of you guys have smartphones? You are all photographers so when you're sourcing imagery imagery can be tricky because it can be expensive but there's a lot of ways to deal with imagery and this is really helpful to share this with your clients that you can get around the expense so you can take them yourself and if anybody has a smartphone the quality of those pictures are generally great for the web you can search creative comments and as long as you use attribution those are also free imagery for the taking you can buy them on like a stock photography site or you can hire a photographer and this is basically from cheapest to most expensive and for those of you who are interested these are a few stock sites and creative common sites that we use a chapter three so the third one down search at creative commons allows you to search Flickr for various creative commons imagery which like I said as long as you use attribution you can use those and I wanted to show a highlight of someone who's dealing with the image thing in a really great way so you see Berkeley recently did a huge brand redesign and they created a huge repository of all their images and I don't know how many of you guys work with universities but like there are thousands of websites and there are people who have no budget and people who have like 100 grand to do a website but every single one of them struggle with the same problem which is that how do I get good quality images and a lot of times these people don't have time you know they've got better things to do updating their website is just like it's not higher on their priority list so just knowing that this solution is out there is just good to share because it's an example of a large institution doing this right. And so if you guys ever work with universities there's always an opportunity to see if they have a solution like this or if they don't you can also recommend they start thinking about it. So the last thing with how to deal with content starts with us as web professionals and that's in the planning development in the UX stage. So some of the questions you're gonna wanna ask whenever you start a project and this should really direct the solutions that you deliver are what is the nature of the content and who are the content creators? If there's a team of really savvy like webmaster type people your solution's gonna be different than if you have someone who's like very afraid of technology. Will it be image heavy? Who's writing and how often are they writing and all of these things should affect how you're both designing and implementing. So I wanted to show something that I designed and something that kind of got in my mind messed up afterwards and then how I solved for it later. So I came up with this design which looked pretty nice. It was a way to showcase news and events on one page and we had a key image and that was to showcase a news or event and then you've got news on one side events on the other side with teasers. But over time this is what it looked like. And so if we ask ourselves why does it look like that? There's kind of a number of reasons and some of it's on the client but some of it is on my team as well because for instance if you look over here on, I can't quite see, but there's a teaser length where we gave the administrator the ability to have a curated teaser. So whenever you think about there's basically attention and drupal development between flexibility and things looking consistent. And we have to walk that line every day and the solutions we provide because the client is gonna say I want ultimate flexibility and it's like okay, that's great and then that person leaves and somebody takes over the website. They don't know any of the thinking of the website and then they just put a whole bunch of crap up there and it looks terrible. And then the other thing in this is that they just didn't even have images. So I had created a default image but had we talked more at length in the beginning about the true ability for them to actually source imagery and this is a resourcing issue on their side with every item and if they said you know what Nika, like this is just too hard, I don't wanna commit to this, I would have said that's fine, we can come up with a solution that's not image based. So what I've been doing now is I've been honestly simplifying things. So this is another side I designed recently where the teaser length is truncated not even by word but by character and what that creates is a very visually consistent look and feel. So it's basically impossible for the administrators to sort of disrupt the view of this list view and so it's a lot more harmonious which makes it again a lot more usable in the end. Other things that we can do include creating help text in the back end. So this is for anyone in the audience who's kind of on the dev side. If you put the image size aspect ratio when you upload an image, it's gonna make a huge difference and I see this get missed a lot because it is additional development and additional work to kind of add those little helper texts on every single page. I keep on showing Berkeley but these guys have just done some really cool stuff lately that I'm really impressed with. So the final thing is that like if you're trying to create a system where people really, really, really can't like fuck up their websites, it has to be really structured. So what these guys did and I totally applaud them is that this page that you're looking at here is like very rigid. You always have that orange bar at the top. You always have to have that key image. It's not optional and you always have to have like the related content on the left and these guys committed to it. They said, you know what, like we are gonna commit to having that imagery. We're gonna commit to keeping our, to having like the related content and they've done it. And that's a sales job on our end. So if we can convince the clients that it's to their benefit to have that kind of structure, it's really gonna help them. But it's a bit of, there's always a bit of attention there because the client, you know, when they're saying what they want, they say they want flexibility, but in the end it kind of can have some unexpected negative consequences. The other thing that we can do from a planning standpoint is to give our content administrators more tools. So a lot of times I see sites that get set up and you pretty much just have a WYSIWYG and that's it. And there's more components that you can add to a site and even like a basic page construction to make it more flexible. So one of these things is just using accordions. And the one thing you wanna be careful about is just not to overuse these, but just having this ability on any given page will give a lot of, it basically allows more opportunities to condense content so that you don't have to expand your navigation. And then also styling anchor links. So for when you guys have really long pages, I see anchor links on the web all the time and they're almost never styled. And what that does is it creates an unexpected experience when you click on an anchor link and suddenly you zip down the page. So having a more consistent design of these things better orient the user when they're going to page what's gonna happen. And one thing I've been doing a lot on my projects is trying to come up with, again, this is like that tension between flexibility and structure. So I've been building these kind of basic pages on a lot of sites that give the end admins a ton of layout options. So all of these slices here basically allow the user to either create a two or a three column layout and each of those slices on any given page you can have one, some, or all of these. Now this is a risky design because as you can expect this is extremely flexible so they could easily add things in here that can cause problems. And so what I've started to do is I've started to create something called Drupal specific editorial guidelines. And what that looks like is it's something very easy to create. I just use a Google doc and I cut and paste the design elements into a bulleted list and I just write down things like the recommended character count for titles and body copy and the image sizes. And this can serve as a reference for the client on launch and also going into the future. And you can design this to make it look a lot more beautiful but at the end of the day it's just something that's utilitarian that allows them to admin their site effectively so this approach has been really positive for us so far. And I wanna talk a little bit about what happens when you don't create this guidance because with responsive design, image sizes are like this unwieldy, unpredictable thing. So on this site right here, when you have a go responsive, their images are super pixelated because they uploaded these graphics and what they probably did was said, oh, this is like the comp, it's 300 pixels upload that and it's like, well, that's great but your break points at 640. So your images look terrible at the break point when you look at them on a larger tablet device. So those kinds of editorial guidelines are a new deliverable that can kind of help that. And when I worked with CCA, one of the things that I realized was that people learn differently. Like some people need to hear directions in person. Some people need to see something that's more designed. Some people need to talk back to say, oh, like hear themselves say what you just said to them and then that helps them learn. And just accepting that fact and figuring out like, okay, if you have a large decentralized group of content administrators, for instance, which is what these guys had, how do you get them all to create content that's consistent? So what I did with them was I actually, a lot of times I don't create really fancy deliverables but for them that are just guidelines because it's like more, it's not time efficient but for these guys, I did it and part of it was because some people in order for them to understand the guidelines for how to write, it's like the visual helped them get it and had like that, oh, that aha moment. And so I created that for them and in addition to that, I met with them in person and I literally met with all of their key content teams and that really helped them understand that, you know, like just for those people who need to hear it in their ears that helped to sink in for them. So the last thing has to do with how we self-identify. So as I said in the beginning, I do not self-identify as a writer but I find myself in these situations constantly where the content, the copy is the problem and I feel compelled to solve it. So this is a design that Garrett did and he came to me and he said, hey, what do you think about this? And I said, you know, the design structure looks fine but this copy sucks, you know, this is like a real problem. I'm not reading this. Like I always say, like if I stare at a page and I'm not automatically reading it then there's something wrong. And so we didn't even ask the client. I said, listen, let's just write a sentence of what we think this means and give it to them and like see what they say. And so we did that. And then they said, oh, okay, that's not quite right but here, let me just change it a little bit and like let's change it to this. So that started the conversation and it allowed us to get to a point where it's like it's a much more effective landing page where you can actually read the copy. And so I really encourage all of you guys to not be afraid to do that, don't be afraid to be a photographer, don't be afraid to be a writer, don't be afraid to propose a solution even if it's a little bit outside what the client's asking for because the content oftentimes is the easiest thing to fix. So that kind of sums up the three things that I think we can do on a global level to help improve this problem and this is by no means like the only things we can do but I really hope this inspires you guys to kind of think about it and to talk about it because just like bringing this back to your agencies or into your in-house departments and sharing this information is like it's part of the education piece, it can be part of the planning piece and I really think it will just help us in the end create a better internet. And that's it, thank you. And for anybody that's got questions, I've got special giveaways for question askers up here. We have Spicerub and eyeglass wipies. The entire presentation is not on the blog but I heard that these are all gonna get uploaded to YouTube in like 20 minutes. So, and if you guys have questions because they're recording, would you mind going to the microphone? I know that's kind of asking a lot. Can you handle it when you want your site and then you look at it again in three months and they've completely ruined everything you did? You give a talk like this. It's the story of my life, you know and that's why I've become a lot more passionate about this particular topic is I just see it as like the final main thing that needs to be addressed in our industry. So, you talked a little bit about this in the beginning and I realized it could be a whole separate session but any quick ideas for how to make the business case for making this role? I mean. I don't have the exact answer to that but the only thing I can think of is that if you think about it in this way, think about when you were in college and you imagine how long it took you to write a term paper. Now, imagine that the success and or failure of your organization depends on the quality of the copy in that term paper. Now, imagine how long that would take to write effectively. That starts to paint a picture and I think everyone's had that we can all relate to as far as like the time because it's like, I think that's the biggest thing is it's a really time consuming task that people usually underestimate and it's like, but that starts to at least get the conversation going. Thanks. I have a similar question. If writing is so not important to the people that own these websites, but they all spend a lot of time with paper and they clearly have some input and interest in writing but they're not interested in writing for the web because everything they do is paper based. Do you have any suggestions with a way to talk to them about that? Are we saying like how to get them to translate their paper stuff to the web? Right, they don't understand the difference. Totally. That blog that I linked to in the beginning, which is on the chapter three website, it's very short and it's a powerful outline of that and you can use that as a reference to send them and the biggest thing is just those top three things that I shared which is that people are task focused, they read slower and they skim. And so with those three things combined with like asking yourself what are the goals of the page, that's the lens by which you should look through the content to reassess how to curate it better for the web. Thanks. So you mentioned a little bit about outsourcing some of the content and you prefer to build your team in-house, but if you have a short timeframe and you don't have the resources, can you give us some tips on how to find the right, either freelancer or ad agency or who can help? I, you know, my personal experience with writers has been only like so-so because I found that when I've hired writers which you've done probably like five times, I find that the work is fine, but that the work done by my internal team is just so much more on point. And it's also because I work with her collaboratively, we're able to make sure that the tone is right. And that's the thing like her and I will just sit in a room and we'll literally do the content together. So I would say if you, you know, as far as how to find those people, you can just find them, you know, on LinkedIn or Craigslist or, you know, through normal means of reaching out. But then, you know, if you wanna work with them, I would say that collaboration is the key thing, you know, and that will ensure the quality a little bit better. Non-profit and I'm in the process of creating a new website for them. I have a fair amount of latitude in content creation and I have a lot of writing and editing experience myself. However, a big section and a really important grant funded section of the website has to do with scientific information that's supposed to be presented for a lay audience, people who are affected by the particular disease that we address. And I've been told that this educational content is being vetted by all the scientific experts and I am not to change anything. I think this has great nightmare potential. And I just like to know if you have any suggestions on how I can kind of gently help them understand that it's gonna integrate a lot better with the website and fit their goals better if I'm allowed to have a little control over things like page length. Understood that. So I think that's a great case for testing. So when you get into those, so in that instance, your stakeholders are probably right in the sense that the content will need to be a lot longer than like a page that's marketing focused. And I deal with that too. And that is a completely acceptable answer. And if you're just looking for ways to maybe improve the usability a little bit, you can do really cheap, easy user testing, get three people who you feel like represent your target audience and maybe have them read that content and find an example of a page on another website that you like and see if they like that better. And if you can maybe take that information and those findings to your stakeholders and say, hey, this is still getting the job done but it's curated in this way. Can we make these changes? That might give you some data to work with to kind of help that test. That's great, thank you. I'm thinking about accordions and anchors as well as you just presented, but doing some testing sounds great. Yeah, and it doesn't have to be like rigorous or expensive. It's literally just getting three people in a room and asking them a few questions. Like they say, test early, test often and grade on a curve. Thank you. Thanks for sharing your experiences. So at my company we have a fantastic creative team and I'm curious about how we can help them develop more savviness around the usability and the content and so that their designs that they're producing reflect some of these principles that you're sharing. Are you a Drupal shop? Not only Drupal. Okay, the best thing I'd say is in the approach I've always taken to chapter three is like I believe it is my team's responsibility to understand the technology. And so we do something called sharing Fridays where we get our devs and our designers and our PMs and everyone in one room to just share anything. It can be a question, a problem or an inspiration and getting those cross-disciplinary conversations going is kind of fundamental to understanding just what each other struggle with as far as problem solving. And the thing is is that developers and designers are the same, they're both creatives. And they're both problem solvers and so I would just work towards fostering a culture where each team learns and cares about how the other one achieves what they're doing and you figure out how to be a partner to each other. So I'd say it comes from like a leadership standpoint. But yeah, it's just a more of a willingness and something as simple as that as we'll get it either. Just a quick add on to that. So we do have that great collaboration between the development team and the creative team but the missing part of that pyramid I think is really that content savviness. So that's I guess more of what I'm curious about is, you know. It would take someone on your team to care about it. So you would have to find, well it is because I mean like I'm basically having this talk, it's like this isn't in my job description really. I mean my job description is kind of whatever I want it to be but like I just feel like my clients need help. And so I would just say, you know, maybe share this talk or just ask them, be like, hey, like, do we want to get into this? And it might even be the answer that you guys say as a company, no, we don't want to get into this. We don't like, we'll give it to them. They can like either keep or screw up the site as they wish. So I think it's in some ways like who do you want to be as a company? But for me, I just feel like this is an opportunity and it's just a problem. Because I truly want to see my clients succeed and so that's partially why I've been drawn towards trying to figure this out. Thanks so much. Sure. Hi, I'm a Drupal developer, overseeing my team of Drupal developers and for myself, the question I have is this in regards to the development that has to happen in regards to authoring experience that gets so often overlooked as opposed to development that happens for user experience. Given a lot of the changes that have happened with Spark and with D8, what can be done better to actually make it so that the people who are authoring and creating content within the CMS are actually having as high a quality of an experience as a user experience. And a lot of that came from having read the book, Content Everywhere, which really made me on our team, the person who Vietmiddly cares about content too. Larger budgets, period. Because that's the thing is that like we do projects all the time and they're like, hey, I've got this amount of money and I wanna do this unbelievably large list of things and we are like, we'll do it for you, man. We're here for you. But a lot of times on that list is not what you're talking about and I completely feel you. I wanna see that too. And there are projects where we've done it and they are pretty big budgets because the work, the development work, it takes, as you guys all know, if you've done Drupal to go into the backend and customize it. Just to add those little things, whether it's helper text or image size dimensions. Every one of those microscopic tasks, finessing the WYSIWYG to debug it and make it more user friendly, those things add up in development hours, cost a lot of money and a lot of companies just don't have those budgets but more money. For university and market degree programs and the people I work with have a lot they wanna say about degree programs and so trying to cut content is really difficult for them. Would a good solution be cutting that content for the web but then linking people to a PDF with more details and more of that content they wanna include and if that were a good solution, how do you think about designing that PDF and looking at the content on the PDF knowing that's an electronic document rather than a print? That's a good question. In general, it is not recommended to show your content online in a PDF unless it technically doesn't make sense to put it on a website and the reason is that it's a lot easier to access that content when it's on a website. In the example that you're giving, I might recommend almost an information architecture refresh where maybe there's one level on a high level that shows the high level marketing communication goals on the top level pages and then the deeper pages you can use to have more of the content so you can have that conversation to figure out what's top level, what are deeper pages and how do you create an information architecture that doesn't just balloon out of control. But PDFs in general, people have done it and it is a solution but the readability online is not as flexible and also if you think of the long-term maintenance of it if you're like, I've got 500 PDFs I have to update, like that's gonna suck. So you know what I mean? Those are the things that you might wanna consider but within all of that, those things with the goals, like make that be your drive, is ask yourself and clarify those goals up front and that will help steer those conversations with your team. So how do I convince the people I work with that people aren't gonna print all these PDFs to have on hand? I mean, that's a big thing I struggle with. Well, they need something to print and when you print the website, they want this PDF. You can do again, probably some, I don't know how to do like the print stats but there might be ways to look at that in your analytics or just ask 10 users. Sure. You know, because that's always a good point. It's like if you're ever stuck, getting data helps those differences of opinion because that happens a lot within an organization where somebody's like, I think this, well I think that and it's like if you hit a roadblock you need a little data just to, because otherwise it's like who's louder or more convincing. Sure. Okay, thank you. Sure. Hi, it sounds like your role might be called content strategist. I feel like I've heard that and maybe that's not accurate or not but I'm just kind of curious how your role plays with the information architect and the UX person and if you're budding heads on things or how you collaborate. I do everything. Yeah, and like there's ultimate say on these things because I imagine everyone wants their voice heard and how that all works out. That's a really good question. At chapter three, like me and all my design team we actually do it all. We do information architecture, content strategy, UX and design. I know in some other places they'll like separate out those tasks but we've taken an approach where like those things are so interwoven that we all do all of them and as I've been in this role longer I agree with you like I kind of think of myself more as a content strategist because that's in some ways the umbrella but we don't bud heads because each of us is usually leading. Like we will sometimes like partner on a project but in general there's no disagreement on things. Okay, great, thank you. At what stage would you start to introduce content strategy into like the design? You know, it's a lot of times it would be like a rush into wireframes or like what stage do you start to bring content into the wireframes or? We try to do it from the very beginning. So when you start a project just by asking yourself like what the goals are and stuff that is strategy and it's going to relate to the content. So we start on day one. If you're asking specifically like do we put real content in wireframes I'd say that we take both approaches and we try to remain flexible for our clients because there's sometimes when like they're like we're on a super tight budget we have no content just like take your best guess we've taken that approach and then we've also taken the approach where we put like the literal content in the wireframes and do high fidelity wireframing and they're like correcting my typos and I'm like you realize this is just a wireframe but like you know so I would say that we do both in general the sooner you can get real content in there the better but because what we do has so many variables there are times when sometimes you just have to like put it in when you get it cause it's like we don't always have control over those things and we have to be flexible. Okay great thanks. Anybody else? Feel free to come and get some of these goodies you guys. Thank you so much.