Tagged with 'content'

Although it’s gone by many names and through many iterations, the practice of content strategy has been around for over a decade. However, content strategist Kristina Halvorson would argue that it’s just beginning to come into its own, both as an essential component of a usable, lasting website, and as a process and strategy in its own right.

The importance of content is often underplayed, overlooked, or seen as something to work around, and a result is often disorganized and lacking, dragging down a potentially impressive site. Drawing on a wealth of personal experience, pioneers in the content strategy movement, and even Pixar’s touching eco-dystopia Wall-E, Kristina spoke with clarity, passion, and humor, outlining content’s frequent role in website creation, how it got pigeonholed there, and what we can do to make sure what’s actually on a website isn’t something shoved between 11th-hour design tweaks and launch. The CEO of Brain Traffic, a Minneapolis-based team of content strategy consultants, she believes in content strategy’s power to benefit user, company, and the Internet as a whole. Click “Read the rest of this entry” to see the video.
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Internal site search is one of those things that seems very simple: type in a term or phrase on a website, and you’ll get a list of results of pages on that site that are likely to contain what you’re looking for — very straightforward. Almost every site has search functionality built in.

It’s not quite that simple, of course, even though Google makes Internet search look like the easiest thing in the world.

What Do You Mean By Search?

First, there needs to be clarity on what someone means by talking about “search” — are we talking about search functionality within the website itself (ie, internal site search)? or are we talking about how people might search to find your site (i.e., external search)? There are approaches and techniques to deal with each type of search, and there is certainly some overlap between them, but they are very different issues. The information here is focused on internal site search.

Where Does That Internal Site Search Result Come From?

It’s important to understand where your search results are really coming from. Most searches are not done in real-time (that is, actually searching your website content at the time you put in your search term), but rather are running against a search index of some kind. A search index is a pre-defined, static pool of possible results. The value of a search index is that all the hard work of filtering for possible relevant terms, weighting relevancy, and optimization have already been done — so when a site visitor actually performs a search, it’s usually pretty fast and pretty on-target for what that person was looking for. The downside of a search index is that it’s a picture of your content at a particular time, so if that content changes (including adding content or deleting content) but the index isn’t updated, people won’t find that updated content.

There are some specialized searches that are done in real-time. For instance, many of Duo’s legal sites have specialized attorney searches that filter by office or practice area. Since these searches are running directly against the main content, they are always up-to-date — but they may not be as fast, and there’s no “results weighting” that can be done once the results come back.

Results weighting is also known as relevancy. It is a very important element to your search results. If you search for “dog”, you probably want those top results to be really focused on dog information. Search engines generally “guess” at that relevancy through a series of rules or parameters. For instance: is “dog” in the title of the page? Is it a term that’s used repeatedly in the body of the content? etc., etc. Very good search engines have been refining those rules for years now, but they rarely expose those rules to the public, since those rules are their competitive advantage.

There are, however, search engines that you can use that will allow you, as the website owner, the ability to tweak those rules to best match your particular content. Obviously the advantage of using one of these engines is that you have the ability to fine-tune your website’s search results. The downside is that this does require some effort, and that effort is ongoing — as your content changes over time, you are likely going to need to periodically revisit the rules you’ve established in your search engine.

Search Options

So on a practical level, what are your options for search? Listed below are some of the search options that Duo Consulting uses. This is not, by any means, an exhaustive listing of search options available. It’s just meant to provide a sense of the variety of options that exist.

eZ Search

eZ Search comes built-in with any site built on the eZ Publish Content Management System. Because it’s built into the system, you can control the frequency with which the site index is built. Thus, if you’re changing the content on your site quite often, you’ll have the ability to make sure that your search results will reflect those changes in a timely manner. There’s no weighting or relevancy, however.

eZ Find

eZ Find also works with the eZ Publish Content Management System. It’s built on the Solr open source search server, and it does allow for very fine-grained relevancy tweaking and options for indexing frequency. It also allows for searches to be done on an entirely separate server from the website itself — an important consideration if your site gets a lot of traffic and you need to consider how to decrease the load on your site as much as possible.

Drupal Search

Drupal, another Content Management System, also has search functionality built into it. As with eZ Search, it’s relatively simple and basic, although you do have control over how frequently your content is indexed. There are some modules (ie, Porter-Stemmer) that can be used in conjunction with the default search to raise the level of sophistication.

Acquia Drupal Search

Acquia is a commercially supported version of Drupal, and they have a search engine which is also based on Solr technology. It can either be used as an externally hosted service (billing is based on the volume of content), or you can use the module built by Acquia and set up a local Solr server. It offers relevance, author filtering (useful for sites using social media), term highlighting, and content recommendations.

Third-Party Search

Third-party search engines, such as Freefind or Google, can be seamlessly integrated into your website. You can retain the look and feel of your site, while at the same time leveraging the power of a search engine company that has already spent the time and effort to refine the relevancy rules. The search index itself, however, is something that you will only have limited control over in terms of indexing frequency and relevancy weighting.

There are a few things that you can do to guide third-party search engines. You can create sitemaps (essentially an XML map of your content that’s easy for search engines to digest), and some third-party search engines do have an on-demand indexing option.

Custom Search

A custom search is a search that’s so specific to certain content that it makes the most sense to custom-code it into the website. This often works for simple things (again, the example of filtering attorneys by office and/or practice area), and the search results are always up-to-date — but a more complex search result requirement begins to creep into re-inventing-the-wheel territory, so this should be used judiciously.

Things to Consider When Planning Your Internal Site Search Strategy

So having said all of this, what kind of search will work best for you? If you can answer the following questions, you’ll be well on your way to figuring out the best solution to fit your needs.

How much content will I have?

If you have a lot of website content, then you will probably need a more sophisticated search engine for the internal search on your site. If you don’t have a lot of content now, then certainly this is something you’d want to evaluate as the site grows — what works on Day One of the site launching may not be as useful a year later.

How much traffic will I have?

If your site has a lot of traffic, then you’ll probably want to consider moving the search traffic off to a server that’s separate from your own site, or a third-party search engine. As with content, this is a situation you’ll want to periodically re-evaluate.

How frequently will I want that content indexed, so that the search results are freshest?

Instantly? Hourly? daily? weekly? If your content must be 100% fresh 100% of the time, then you’ve narrowed your choices to search engines that you’ll have direct access to controlling the refresh time. That said, this is something to look at carefully — does it really have to be that closely in sync with real-time content updates?

How much fine-tuning and/or control do I want over the search results?

…and how much effort do you want to put towards that fine-tuning and control? If this is important for you (i.e., you want to make sure that content within an employee’s primary biography is weighted more heavily in search results than his or her community activities), then you’ll want a search engine that you can have that level of control over. On the other hand, it will mean a commitment on your part to invest in the time to experiment and tweak those settings, and that will probably need to be revisited over time as your content changes as well.

There are still quite a few nuances to talk through beyond this, but tackling these questions at the beginning will certainly get you most of the way there.

What About External Search?

If you are concerned about how public search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.) will find your site, then you will be focused on optimizing your site for that: Search Engine Optimization (SEO). They key to good SEO for your site is good content, of course, but beyond that, Duo would be happy to speak with you about detailed approaches and strategies for your site.

LinkedIn Answers offers a way to ask and answer questions from other professionals on LinkedIn. Some of the top people are answering nearly 200 questions a week! This service hopes to tap the “wisdom of the professional crowd.” And quite often it hits the mark even with questions whose answer is typically, “It depends.” We know those answers require the most wisdom and professional experience to answer.

I stumbled upon two seemingly opposing questions in LinkedIn this week, as if one person needs to find the other. I was intrigued.

On The Content Wrangler Community LinkedIn group, one person asks if it’s possible to find a web content job that’s not also a programming job, or a content creation job that would offer technical training on the job. While it’s a post in the Jobs area, and not in the Answers area, it caught my eye as an interesting question. So I did a search for “web content” in LinkedIn Answers and came across another question about web content has to do with copy writing and how to find writers who can write exceptionally even in specialized niches.

The answers for the first question, where the person seems to have more content creation skills than tool skills, seem to say that a generalist’s approach is more valuable to most companies today. They list all the different tasks they’ve done in a business environment. One person even says, “good writing is neither understood nor very highly valued.”

Yet one of the answers to the question asking for niche content creators gives a quite specific method for finding good writers, namely journalists. She says “In addition to MediaBistro.com, I suggest the American Society of Journalists and Authors at ASJA.org. (Writers are vetted and national writing experience is required for membership.) … An experienced journalist can learn about a new topic and write about it in away that is both sophisticated and readable, minus the industry jargon.”

So while these questions seem related, you learn more by reading both discussions and coming to your own conclusion. I plan to do some searching in this crowd wisdom collection myself. Does anyone have good examples of LinkedIn Answers coming to the rescue for tough questions?

Terms of use and privacy policies, how often do you read these terms before agreeing to them? Most of us would admit we don’t read the fine print even when it’s prominent large type. But when a community member does pay attention to a change in the terms of service and gets 100,000 other people to pay attention also, you’d better believe that the originator of the terms and policies are going to take notice. That scenario happened just last week for members of Facebook, one of the largest social media sites with 175 million active users and the most visited site in January 2009 with 1.2 billion visits according to Compete.com.

Democratic Approval for Social Networking Usage

Rather than a Terms of Use statement, the phrase for the future terms on Facebook will be “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.” Now, to get a user-voted statement approved, it needs 30% of active users to vote on it, which is 53 million people according to this article on Top Tech News. That number is 23 times the number of “fans” that Facebook has on Facebook. Yow! The voting closes March 29, and you had to be a member on February 25th to be eligible to vote.

The content “ownership” isn’t all that contentious, in my mind. It’s similar to how you treat email – you send a message to a friend, then delete it from your “Sent” box, but it still exists on your friend’s email server. As this Scientific American blog entry points out, ” The terms still indicate that Facebook can make copies of member content and, even if a member removes content from the site, Facebook can still retain archived copies of that information. Facebook isn’t claiming to own that information, but it isn’t promising to delete that info either.”

Watch out for a viral message that you’re in violation

And now for the Public Service portion of this blog entry. If you’re on Facebook and see a message from one of your Facebook friends that you’re in violation of the Terms and Conditions, do not “Click for Details.” It’s a virus that someone has engineered.

Sony’s Network Policy

Sony had a similar uproar from users over the network policy changes that occured before a new game called LittleBigPlanet was released last fall. For a game whose premise contains aspects of sharing creations, the terms that players agreed to were vital to its success. One blogger, Dean Longmore, a technical writer no less, talked about his concerns last October in “LittleBigRipoff? Sony can sell your user content” where he noted that the terms say that “Sony may sell subscription services or gain advertising revenue related to your content.” It seems that Sony hasn’t gone so far as to sell user content, nor does it yet allow users to create their own “stickers” by uploading images to the game. So it could be that this contention in the terms of use have perhaps limited gameplay to an extent.

What do you think? Are you concerned about your rights to one day delete uploaded content? Or is this uproar going to settle out as more trust is built between companies and their customers?

When I’m not pondering the status of the Internet I help a graphic designer friend by writing code for her clients’ websites. One of our clients owns a hip and trendy spa that marries a massage clinic with a gallery featuring work created by local artists. As I spoke with this client, I discovered that this was more than a business for her. It is a reflection of her passion for wellness, a holistic sense of being.

In addition to her knowledge of the musculoskeletal systems she treated, she considers artwork to be a form of therapy that provides healing for the mind. When she talked about her clinic, her passion was contagious. Fairly soon I began to see the world through her eyes, and started to want what she wanted: for the world to experience total wellness.

Our conversation developed along the lines that she should capture these thoughts and release them on her website as a blog. I suggested this to the graphic designer, who immediately kiboshed this idea, saying, “When I visit a website to read about a spa, I don’t want to read a stupid blog.” So that was the end of that. I promised myself that I would not let this die.

Maybe your business isn’t a massage clinic, but you are probably as passionate about the heart of your business as my client is about hers. I’m not talking about what you do. I’m talking about your business being an extension of who you are. For your business, I believe a blog is the answer. But not a stupid blog.

Why a Blog?

When I told the graphic designer that we should incorporate a blog, her first thoughts were that it would be a collection of meaningless posts amounting to nothing more than naval gazing. I explained that she described “Twitter”, and that a blog doesn’t have to be like that. I’m sure she also thought about how managed blogs on blogspot.com and wordpress.com don’t give users explicit control over the layouts.

A blog engine is a content management system (CMS) that provides the simplest means for content entry and publishing on the planet. Engines differ in scope of features, but most users would find it easy to enter and edit articles, and installing the software on your own web host provides the ability to customize your page layouts. Most engines provide a means to install plugins and widgets that extend the functionality of the blog, adding really cool features that average website users would never have thought possible to include on their own sites.

What Do I Blog About?

My intent is not to convince you to use your blog as a marketing tool, which is the most common use for a blog after random sputtering, but rather an online repository of informational articles, discussions of subjects of interest, news and notes, and in the case of my spa friend, upcoming events and reviews of past events at the clinic.

My spa friend considers herself a “wellness practitioner”, and could write about the role ergonomics, diet, meditation, and regular treatment play in maintaining wellness. Also, their esthetician is passionate about using organic products in her treatments.  If they didn’t feel confident about writing their entries, I could have written the articles for them based on our discussions about what they were interested in.

Likewise, there are aspects of your business that you find work well, and others that are more challenging. You could use blogging as a means to elicit discussion in your search for a solution. Since I started my multifarious blogs, my topics ranged from the foibles in setting up my Tablet PC, coding websites to be compatible with the Mac, and most recently, my struggles learning to code using the ExtJS JavaScript framework. The last post elicited a comment from the development team, which gave me enough hope to continue pushing through.

How Can Blogs Help My Business?

While the impression is that blogs are a one-way, “push” communication mechanism, blogs are designed to be conversations. News sites post articles about recent events (hello—that’s a blog entry) and other users respond to that entry by posting comments. The most controversial articles incite discussion between comment writers themselves, and that adds new value to the existing content on your page. Now, instead of only reading your post on the wonders of caffeine to stimulate your dreams in sleep, readers can participate in the ensuing discussion, more than likely quoting studies of the effect of caffeine on the nervous system, the loss of REM stage activity, et cetera.

The reader community improves the quality of your content, and suddenly, your post takes on a life of its own.

If you don’t feel like you have the time nor the talent to write the quantity of quality entries you want to see on your site, you can hire content creation specialists who can blog for you. You can work out in your deal if the work is meant to be in your voice, or if the writer will receive public credit for their work. Several such services exist, and many content management specialists will contract out to them.

Frequent blog posts of consistent information quality also help your business by adding to the content from your site indexed by search engines.  Your site’s page rank is driven first by popularity—the number of external pages that link to your site, and then by currency—how recent the pages were most updated? Content quality is rated by relevance and keyword frequency—the number of pages within your site that emphasize the same subject matter.

Search engine algorithms are actually a lot more complicated than that, and change often. However the basic rule still applies: websites that contain well-written, quality content, properly structured for machines to read and index well, supported by accurate keywords and summary descriptions, rank higher in search engine indexes. While it’s not a good practice to try and fool Google, it is possible to use blog software to create a site with valuable content that drives your site to the top of the search engine index for your chosen subject matter.

And that can no way be considered a stupid blog.

Yahoo Pipes offers access to the data and information constantly streaming along the Internet in an accessible way to web programmers and non-programmers. The user interface involves dragging and dropping boxes and connectors, then clicking choices from a drop-down list.

I really do feel like I’m riding on a river of information most days, and have adopted a more serendipitous, free-flowing sense of when I’ll get the next bit of information that’s useful to me. But with content aggregation and the power of the filtering mechanisms, the river becomes a stream becomes a pipe with customized clear drinking water in a manageable fountain spray rather than a fire hose. But if you do want to drink from the Social Media Firehose, I recommend that Pipe. It uses data from all the big name social media sites, including Flickr, Twitter, Friendfeed, and Digg.  The beauty of these pipes is that you can build on what others have created. Unfortunately, with a product name like iMIS and a company name like ASI, I’d prefer to filter the list of results by English language content only, but that filter isn’t available on the content from those feeds apparently.

Corvida on the Read Write Web has done an excellent job of gathering and categorizing the most popular Yahoo Pipes and giving explanations of each in The Ultimate Yahoo! Pipes Creations List. She lists three categories for these pipes: Social Submission and Aggregation Yahoo Pipes, Pricing Alert Yahoo Pipes – Catch That Deal! and Media Yahoo Pipes.

If you’ve ever been frustrated with the way that Joomla handles feeds, you might do what the Kingman Bicycle Outfitters webmaster did – created a Yahoo Pipes badge of cycling news feeds.

Or if you’re the site designer for the Calistoga Inn and you want to show pictures of the lovely area surrounding your Inn, you’d create a Yahoo Pipe badge that shows photos on a map.

Now, one immediate caveat to the Yahoo Pipes service is that it does not have a Service Level Agreement so access could disappear one day. I’m not sure what you’d do to substitute a custom-built pipe. Grazr offers custom-built feed processing tools and a similar “badge” for inserting content from feeds on your website. But it would appear that all the excitement and energy surrounds Yahoo Pipes. What are other great examples you’ve seen lately?

Well-written content adds value to any website. Whether for business or personal use, a website should provide information that increases the knowledge store of the World Wide Web. A key benefit of expanding your website content is that it provides more terms for search engines to index. An additional plus is that websites that update more frequently often earn a higher rank due to their activity.

How does content get on your website? There are three simple methods:

• Write it yourself.
• Hire the services of other writers.
• Aggregate content from outside sources.

(Okay, there is a legendary fourth, which is to let a room full of monkeys loose on various computers and see if they can type the collected works of Shakespeare. But only the above three are practical.)

My post on the benefits of cloud computing is an example of the third option, exercised by the Cloud Computing Journal, an online magazine published by SYS-CoN Media that uses all three methods to increase their content base. What struck me about their method of content aggregation is that within minutes of posting the article, Jeremy Geelan, Sr. Vice-President of SYS-CON Media & Events, sent me an email requesting permission to reprint it, offering full credit and a bio.

This was unexpected, but refreshing. Websites that aggregate content usually do so by programming a script to search the web for content and post it to their site verbatim. The intent of this method is to increase their indexed content and drive their search engine page rank, but all it does is create a mess of noise on the Internet. Articles about securing your java application and enjoying a java chip mocha frappuccino don’t usually belong on the same page, but they might if they share the word java.

Even if an automated script could request permission from content authors before copying it onto their site, it would be difficult to automate a filtering mechanism that also ensures the content is relevant. Alternatively, a human being can review all aggregated content and apply their own site’s editorial guidelines to add value before posting it live. This is what set my experience with SYS-CON apart from the rest:

They Credit Their Sources

By offering to post links back to Duo Consulting and my personal/professional blog, they already received top marks in my book. One of my friends complains that his photographs are all over the Internet without any credit back to the source. His website explicitly states that he allows anyone to use his images provided they acknowledge where they came from. A simple email request could avoid creating bad blood between your organization and theirs.

They Edit Content to Increase Value

Since posting my article to the Duo Consulting’s blog, it’s taken on a whole new life. The alternate version sports a spunky new title and tag line:

The Three Salient Features of Cloud Computing: Accessibility, Availability, and Scalability: Cloud computing provides tangible benefits, available to users on request

Also, my closing paragraph is now at the beginning, which gives additional weight to my all-time favorite lines:

“…the availability of our resources dictates our current needs…and our needs always expand beyond the capacity of our resources….”

In addition, Jeremy reviewed my blog’s About Tony Chung page and hand-crafted an author bio with a photo.

They Ask for Permission

I mentioned to Jeremy that I would be writing this article, and gave him my initial three-point skeleton. He wanted me to list this point at the top, because for them, there is no substitute for the personal touch when aggregating content. I chose instead to close with this point, because it is by far the most important concept in re-purposing content from outside sources.

Requesting permission to reproduce others’ ideas shows respect to the creator, elicits respect from the creator, and fosters a sense of community. This experience is what drove me to write this article, because the simple effort of ask me impressed me so much. According to Jeremy, this has been SYS-CON’s model for years, and will continue to be their model.

Content may be freely available on the web, but it is definitely not free.

What do you do when your web content engine, while aging gracefully, indicates to you that it’s ready for the rocking chair on the porch? Serena Collage had an internal communication leak to a few message boards, such as the Collage Higher Ed Yahoo Group and their own Support forums, that hints at the eventual sunsetting of the product.

Later correction and clarification came on the Support forum from Vickie Schira of Serena, saying “Serena has not announced any major changes to the Collage product plan, and there isn’t an announcement planned that I’m aware of. In case you haven’t seen it before, Serena does have a published end of life (EOL) process. That process gives a two year lead into ending support. The two year timer begins when Serena notifies the customer base. If you would like to read more about the EOL process, you can see it here.”

With a detectable trend toward fewer updates for a product, perhaps even expiration of support of the product, what are some considerations for migrating the content? Duo Consulting is researching products that can be suitable alternatives to Serena Collage. One key tactic is ensuring that both the content and the structure migrate smoothly to a new platform. While the sun hasn’t set on Serena, good content and structure decisions assist in smooth moves no matter where your content lives and breathes.

One of the speakers at this year’s Web Content Conference proposed that Web 1.0 was about connecting people to content, Web 2.0 about connecting people to each other, and Web 3.0 will be about connecting content to people. While everyone feels differently about “Web 3.0,” and some think we should just do away with the versioning altogether (the Web is the Web is the Web), it is undeniable that content is important and will be even more important as the Internet continues to evolve. Google’s Dick Costolo talks about “hypersyndication” – a world where all content is shared, remixed, socialized and distributed everywhere. For that scenario to be possible, there has to be quality content.

Even media conglomerate Time Warner realizes the importance of quality content – its strategy is now to focus more on “content creation.” According to Time Warner’s new CEO, Jeff Bewkes, “in a digital age, content becomes more valuable, not less, because it’s becoming cheaper to deliver.”

As the headline of the New York Times article boldly proclaims, “content is back.”