Content Strategy for the Non Content Strategist

I am not a content strategist. I am a freelance designer who also develops all of my own work. All aspects of each project fall on me; I have 100% of the responsibility. This means I also have to handle the content strategy. But I am not a content strategist. Or am I?

Web design has grown into a big business, and as it has grown it has splintered into a half-dozen hazily-defined fields: User Experience, User Interface, Information Architecture, Front-End / Back-End Development, and Content Strategy. (These, in addition to non-design jobs like SEO Specialists, Marketers, and Copywriters.) When designing a site for a large enterprise, it's likely there will be a budget for hiring dedicated staff for each role, a full team of people. When designing for small businesses (small-scope), the budget may only allow for one -- just a single person. That's a lot of responsibility for one person.

I've been freelancing for a year now, and if there's one thing I know I did correctly at the beginning, it was accepting this fact. Being both designer and developer meant I needed to think deeply about everything when starting a new project. If I ignored my duties as a UX designer, users might leave client's sites with bad impressions. If I didn't prepare for the IA, users might get lost and frustrated. If I didn't consider the CS, the client might not know how to use their own site, or the importance of copy clarity over flashy style.

I didn't expect this, but I've come to regard content strategy as the most important aspect of my job. It snuck up on me. Once I started considering content first, making it the priority, it shaped how I did everything else. Organization and aesthetics and typographic treatment and CMS customization, all these things suddenly seemed much much easier. Any time I felt I was against a wall with the design I would take a step back, reflect on my content strategy, and that wall would disappear. There is something about the panoramic view I get from Mount CS that clarifies all the mystery of Web design.

For all the great resources out there for content strategy, the numerous blogs and magazines, I can't recall anyone explaining how freelancers like me should approach content strategy. I think there's a distinction between what a Content Strategist does, and what a Design/Developer does when doing content strategy. The specifics of that distinction might be better defined by someone more experienced than me, but I'm sure they're there. I'm thinking there is a market for educating small-scope designers how they might properly include content strategy into their workflow. I would like to read it. Maybe I'll write it.