While working on a new section for the website I’m in charge of, it occurred to me that this task could be compared to filing paper documents, and should be achieved in five steps.

Gathering documents

This first step is about gathering all information you want to publish in the new section. It includes making sure all information you get belongs to the same set of boxes. You also have to make sure each piece of content appears only once. Find a native location for each of them, reuse will be dealt with later (but you can already take notes of what will be reused). It is also the right time to exclude information already showing in any other section of the website. You want to gather only core documentation for the topic you’re interested in.

Opening boxes

Content now needs to be organised into sub-topics. Think of them as if they were the boxes to which you break down documentation. Content generally can be broken down using these useful questions: what, who, how, when, where. Depending on the amount of content, you will end up with one or more pages for each “box”. The challenge is to have not too much and not too few boxes.

Writing the labels

Deciding on what each sub part should be named may seem a not so important matter. Indeed it is one of the most crucial decisions you have to make when setting up your new section. Because such a label should be meaningful for all users and should reflect the efficient information organisation you came up with in the previous phase. If you can’t find a harmonious and efficient set of labels to put on your boxes, it may mean you have to reconsider your set of boxes or repartition among them.

Filling boxes

It is now time to proceed to actual filing: put each document in a box. A document should go in one box and only one. You will deal with reuse and links later on. If you find one box is over packed compared to others, you may have to review your boxes or labels to reach a good balance. Once you’re done, have a look at your filled and labelled boxes. Do you reckon it is easy to find where any topic belongs? Ask a friend to do the same exercise, and make any adjustment they would suggest.

Finalising organisation

You now have a well balanced set of information. At that stage you will want to optimise your content inserting links between pages and displaying some information in more than one place. It is now time to tag, highlight and comment content properly to use your CMS re use facilities in full.

Remember that what you’re looking to achieve is a meaningful, complete and well balanced section that allows users to find what they are looking for. That’s why I recommend this 5 steps approach: gathering, breaking down, labelling, filing, linking.

When reading advice about ways leading to successful website, one often bumps into “make sure you publish quality content”. Ok. But what is it exactly? There is nothing new in the following pieces of advice, just a reminder of what makes a piece of content worth reading.

Interesting

The most obvious, but often overwhelmed, is that your content has to be interesting. Does it answer a question? Solve a problem? Address a common concern? Entertain? Move? Rectify a myth? If none of them, there are chances it won’t get much interest. You also have to make sure you publish original content. It is ok to deal with a commonly discussed topic. It is not to re-use content find on some other website. All this may mean you won’t be able to publish a new story every second day, but whatever. It is always better to choose quality over quantity. And one more thing: keep it up to date. If any part of your content is date related, make sure it keeps in touch with present, not past.

Pleasant to read for humans

Give comfort to your readers’ eyes. Make text easy to scan, highlighting structure and main ideas. Keep layout clear, with enough white space. Mind the grammar and get rid of any typo. Use images only to illustrate the topic of an article, not just because it is nice to see smiling people on a web page. Avoid any interference with your text (e. g. pop-up, advertisements, etc.). Don’t forget about accessibility standards as they give guaranty your content can be read by all.

Easy to find

Visible content is only a part of what you have to take care of. Don’t forget hidden content, that is descriptive information that is especially interesting for information retrieval: meta, URL, keywords, etc. This is useful for SEO, but also for users browsing your website as hidden content is often used for information organisation as well. Let’s say main content is beans in their tin, and hidden content is the label that allows you to identify your favorite brand of beans on the supermarket shelves.

Understandable for machine

Here we are talking about content structure. Further to hidden content, structure gives a new dimension to your content, making it readable/understandable/exchangeable automatically. Unfortunately, structure is not the easiest part to deal with for end users. The first step would be to make sure you use html standard properly. The next step would be to harass your IT specialist to adopt tools using structure formats such as DITA, XML or microformats. If we all start doing this, semantic web is just a few steps away, hurray.

So there are more than one dimension in content quality. Remember you need to be noticed and understood by readers, whatever the way they access your content. So make sure every bit of your publications give a good and attractive image of it.