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Happy 2009! Hope your past two weeks were filled with festivities, feasting, and family fun.

In between the celebrations and sick days (our house was hit by a variety of phlegm-filled plagues), I spent several hours luxuriating in the company of some of the web industry's finest thinkers. That is to say, I read a lot. As I'm on an insane (albeit self-imposed) deadline for my book about content strategy, I needed to get as much research done as possible in a very short amount of time.

Many of these titles have been on my shelf for years and are my go-to reference guides. A few were brand-new undertakings. Many, I love. Some, I do not. (I'll save the reviews and commentary for future blog posts.) Regardless, here's the list.

• Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug
• Letting Go of the Words by Ginny Redish
• Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan Brown
• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Peter Morville & Louis Rosenfeld
• The Elements of User Experience by Jesse James Garrett
• The Ten Demandments by Kelly Mooney
• Content Critical by Gerry McGovern
• Web Analytics Demystified by Eric Peterson
• Web ReDesign 2.0: Workflow that Works by Kelly Goto and Emily Cotler
• Get Content. Get Customers. by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett
• The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird
• Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web by Christina Wodtke
• The Web Content Strategist's Bible by Richard Sheffield

If I'm looking for every useful book out there that discusses (even sideways) planning,
creating, and managing web content … what did I miss?

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Posted in Content Strategy, Information Architecture, Web Writing

This morning, while looking for a quote from Richard Saul Wurman (the guy who coined the term "information architecture"), I absentmindedly stuck "history of IA" into Google. I got—you guessed it—42,000,000 results on the history of Iowa. This exercise was a good reminder of three things I know to be true:

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Posted in Information Architecture

Yep. It’s that time of year. My mom just sent me a preview of the annual holiday letter to friends and family. Yet again, this was a good exercise for me to figure out how to tell my family just what it is that I do.

Sounds easy enough, right? I mean, we’re not talking about rocket science here (I leave that up to my sister, the chemist).

Yet, every year, I struggle with developing the holiday letter nugget. Not because I used to write for a living (and obsessively edit and re-edit the letter to make my kitchen remodel sound glamorous), but because there’s a lack of shared vocabulary.

Aunt Carol has never heard of “user experience.” Uncle Mike doesn’t know what separates an “information architect” from the person who built his condo. Pat from across the street isn’t sure how “content” is all that different from designing websites. And the phrase “content strategy” just doesn’t mean anything to Grammie.

So … yeah. Here’s what I’m thinking of sending back to my mom:

As a content strategist, I help clients figure out what their website should say and how it should be said.

In order to do this well, I team up with an information architect, who helps figure out which content should go where. 

Together, with the help of a web writer (who’s good at writing copy that works well online), we help businesses make websites that help their customers gather information and complete tasks without any hassle.

Hey, that works! Next year I’ll tackle describing metadata analysis.

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Posted in Content Strategy, Information Architecture