Using Back End Development to Improve Content Strategy
By Dennis Clemente
NEW YORK—Is content strategy going to be more effective if you consider it part of back-end development? If companies think marketing is all after the website or app is done, they should really think again. More than ever, structure is essential to making content future-friendly.
Carrie Hane of Tanzen Consulting, who works in both front and back end, said developers appreciate it even more if a content strategist can communicate with them about how content should be structured on the back end. Hane spoke last December 7 at the Huge meetup at its offices in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Hane is an independent consultant who helps organizations increase income and decrease costs by rethinking how they create, manage and connect their content.
“You will take blocks of content and break them down into smaller chunks which can be reused, remixed, restyled, and repurposed as needed. With a detailed content model in place, you can plan for implementation in a content management system (CMS) and for display across all your target interfaces,” she said.
She outlines the benefits of having back-end content strategy through the following:
- Takes content out of its silos
- Atomizes content, so it can be reused, remixed, restyled
- Makes content available for each channel device, audience segment
- Put technology to work to deliver content
- Focuses on author as user in the design of the CMS
- Ensures extensibility and scalability
- Future friendly – ready for whatever is next
Taking this further, she said structured content is cross-platform ready and robot-readable.
Semantic meaning and relationships stored in the database and expressed through the interface. With relationships held at data level, rather than just at page level, you can design interfaces that allow readers to explore the content many different ways.
The future-friendly approach, she said, looks at structure as a developer would—separating out the model, the various interface views, and controlling interactions. “Designing content-first ensures the interface design supports the content. Not only will this process better serve the users, it will allow content to be created in parallel with the design and implementation.”
“Designing future-friendly content means applying as much effort to planning and creating content structures as you would to designing interfaces,” she said.
Some UX designers may consider a site or app’s flow and neglect to think about content as part of an entire back-end strategy, which could help immeasurably in terms of managing content and marketing it properly. It’s time designers think that loren ipsum text has a purpose beyond just being a placeholder text.
