The topic for the most recent meetup was: “Content’s Forgotten Corners”. Content strategist Kerry-Anne Gilowey presented her topic.
It was refreshing to hear a talk on content strategy, continuing on from the topics of the July meetup which were focused on the psychological and organisational aspects of user experience.
The screenshots from lorem oopsum that Kerry-Anne shared were amusing and I think it’s safe to say that we’ve all had an experience like that before, whether online or offline. It definitely highlights the need for quality control throughout your process.
Cross-channel consistency stood out for me as the most important element of content strategy. Especially with the ever increasing number of platforms where published content can be displayed. It reminded me of an article that Karen McGrane wrote on A List Apart, titled: Uncle Sam Wants You (to Optimize Your Content for Mobile) where she mentions making data available through an API.
This ties in nicely to the other important element: author experience, where Kerry-Anne highlighted some of the issues we’re facing with current CMSes. It is definitely an area of the Web which is getting some much needed attention, for example: Inside the Guardian’s CMS: meet Scribe, an extensible rich text editor</a>. This enables writers and journalists to create and format rich content, which then generates valid markup. Many existing solutions offer similar formatting features, but output invalid HTML.
Kerry-Anne has kindly made the slides from her presentation available for us on SlideShare.
Thank you to Gideon Carstens for organising this month’s meetup and also to Allan Grey for hosting the event. They have a seriously kick-ass auditorium!