DrupalCon 2013 in Portland Oregon is right around the corner! I’m so excited for my talk: “So Happy Together (Content Strategists and Project Managers Are)” on Wednesday, May 22nd at 10:45AM.
During this session we’ll discuss how much we CMS Mythbusters respect and appreciate the rapidly emerging discipline of content strategy. Ironically, after all these years building CMS driven websites, there is one thing we still wish people were more aware of: content matters. Sounds silly right? After all, the ‘C’ in ‘CMS’ stands for…Well, content.
However, project stakeholders are often so wrapped up worrying about technical risks or marveling over new designs that content can nearly be forgotten or worse…Treated as an unimportant ‘detail’ to be figured out later (queue Lorum Ipsum).
Content Strategy Meets Project Management
We’ll take a look at tools of the trade in content planning and strategy, discuss when and how to integrate content strategists and some of the consequences of ignoring this important aspect of designing and building new web properties. We’ll also be handing out *exclusive CMS Myth prizes* so you won’t want to miss this one!
P.S. – If you’re a regular CMS Myth reader and you recognize the title of this session, your eyes are not deceiving you…It’s based on a blog post I wrote last year.
![By Michael Holley Swtpc6800 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.cmsmyth.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/card-catalog-e1368118635442.jpg)
Photo By Michael Holley Swtpc6800 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
As the folks at CERN recently celebrated, it was twenty years ago that the core technologies and standards of the world wide web (including code for a web server and a line-mode client) were officially placed in the public domain. Tim Berners-Lee’s invention, designed to enable researchers to share research documents across multiple computing platforms and formats, would quickly outgrow these academic beginnings to become a global force for business and social interaction.
It helps to remember this history, though, as we still struggle with one of the fundamental assumptions of early HTML (and its predecessor SGML):
Content has its own internal structure separate from the specific presentations which might be made of it.
This core notion of separation of content from presentation has been a challenge ever since. We just can’t seem to come to grips with the notion that the web is different than print, and that rather than trying to control the output across device types, contexts, and users, we ought to aim for flexibility. (In the 10 years between John Allsop’s The Dao of Web Design and Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design, the majority of the industry – with some notable exceptions – largely fell back into a pattern of fixed page designs for the desktop browser).
Enter Content Strategy
While the approaches like progressive enhancement, adaptive web design, and responsive web design have helped the situation significantly, by helping realize the goal of flexible presentations rendering reasonably on various devices, form factors, and contexts, they only account for content presentation.
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![By Michael Holley Swtpc6800 (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACopyright_Card_Catalog_Files.jpg)
