Our content strategy - a few ideas and notes - part II

We have based the website structure (IA), design and content strategy on lots of things but a couple stand out:

• We need to connect with a community of people who care about WorldSkills, create stories that resonate with them and encourage them to tell their friends. Community is king. This community-based approach is one of the only successful models left as content consumption reaches saturation. Community, to be clear, refers to the potential rather than the current groups of users. Our approach needs to reach beyond the WorldSkills tribe, developing audiences, not just nurturing the existing community.
• We need to cater for three common information seeking behaviours: known-item seeking, exploratory seeking and discovery.

To cater for different users with different behaviours, we have balanced a clear navigational structure with natural user progression based on appropriate presentation of content. We have created a top navigation to cater for known-item seeking, but beyond that instead of asking the exploratory and discovery users (the majority of our users) to pick something based on one or two words in a navigation list, we have create “link blocks” with various degrees of emphasis - very big, big, medium, small - which have images with depth of meaning and animation and tagline which further strengthens the information scent. They also provide nice big areas to hit on smaller touch screens.

This is not to say more levels of navigation are necessarily bad. Sites like the BBC and the New York Times - organisations which produces scores of articles every day - show a second level of navigation. If our content demanded more levels of navigation to be presented explicitly, we would include it following a similar approach, but it simply doesn’t. Trying to do so would be confusing to our users and perhaps force us into certain behaviours which would not help us to meet our core objectives.

We have three content major types at our disposal:

1. Landing - can be used at different levels. All subpages in that section ​must​ be shown in link blocks as well as any other information that might be useful, e.g feature an article
2. Page - this will “live” under a section and is for evergreen content. A page will be shown as a link block in its section or subsection but can be featured elsewhere. It’s url will be /section/page
3. Article - this will “live” in news but can be tagged and featured in various ways.It’s url will be news/article. There’s all kinds of types under article from scroll story to FAQ to press release.

Most of the content will come be an article as we write interesting stories on different aspects of the competition - from tourism to teams to skills to competitors - but the skew is to pages right now because that’s what we’ve being doing to create the foundations of the website.

So how would this work in practice? I’ve created an example:

• http://worldskills.github.io/worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/your-hosts/ Big feature slot promoting Abu Dhabi, which is a subsection of your hosts. Abu Dhabi is linked to directly from the home layout as well.
• http://worldskills.github.io/worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/your-hosts/abu-dhabi/ Abu Dhabi is itself a landing layout. Orientation comes from the breadcrumb. On this landing layout, we have all sub-pages in this section as well as a selection of featured articles. The pages are fixed, but the articles will change based on the content we produce and the types of things we want to feature at any point in time.
• http://worldskills.github.io/worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/your-hosts/abu-dhabi/about-abu-dhabi/ This is as deep as we would want to go in the site structure. I’s a page which would live under the Abu Dhabi section and accessed by a permanent link block on the Abu Dhabi landing layout but also promoted elsewhere on the site if required.
• Also take a look at http://worldskills.github.io/worldskillsabudhabi2017.com/news/ where we have featured sections which encourage discovery as well as filters and link blocks for known-item information seeking, e.g. journalists.

There’s a distinction between ’10 places to stay in AD’ (an article), and ‘Places to stay in AD’ (a page). The latter is static, has to be written in a certain way and should be used sparingly. The article approach is better to fulfil our objectives in most cases. It would “live” in /news but it could be featured around the site. It can be written in a journalistic style with an angle and gives us something to promote on social media for our tribe to share and promote their own worldview. These articles wouldn’t get lost because they live in /news and filters would allow known-item seeking users to narrow down their search, but that isn’t the majority of our users.

I’m sure lots of things will change as we develop and refine this approach, but this represents where we’re up to at the moment.