Content Strategy and the Future

Now, I'm not a licensed content strategists -- nor have I ever held that official title -- but I think about it plenty. I also try hard to keep content strategy in mind when designing and developing. What has become clear to me is that it is a field proportionately far more important than it usually gets resources for. With each new Website I build, I'm spending more time focused on the planning stages, asking myself (and the clients) questions gathered from CS articles. The result is not just better looking Websites, but better working Websites.

Content strategy is important. And it's only going to be more so in the future. In her article, "Content Strategy: learned, unlearned, and (just a little bit) uncensored ", Kate Towsey says, "I realised that Content Strategy is not about documentation, it can’t be and shouldn’t be, but rather, it’s about altering processes and about changing how people think and therefore how they create and communicate." As technology changes and we start to own more products with Web access built into them -- glasses, watches, etc. -- we will have to think differently about the content that goes into them.

When I resumed designing Websites last year, I jumped right in to responsive design. Using media queries felt fresh and new, and it's still exciting to me. I love that with just a few adjustments to CSS, my designs can look equally as good on a phone or tablet as it does in a desktop browser, and be functional in appropriately different ways. It's going to be fun to wonder about making a full website work on a watch, too. Or a car dashboard. Or a bathroom mirror.

And the first thing I will consider when those possibilities become reality will be my content strategy. The very first thing.