A few months ago I went to collect a friend from hospital. Arriving early, I entered the waiting room and noticed in-house magazines stacked by the door. I picked one up, grabbed a coffee and took a seat. The magazine read like a very long press release, blabbering on about patient-centric care and employee awards. I was quickly bored, so I read from my phone instead. The magazine failed in its purpose. Effective content marketing holds people’s attention. It gives you a distinctive brand, loyal fans and increased sales. You don’t need a big budget to succeed,...

    The first thing to understand about content strategy is that no two people understand it the same way. It’s a relatively new — and extremely broad — discipline with no single definitive definition. A highly informative Knol on content strategy defines it as follows: Content strategy is an emerging field of practice encompassing every aspect of content, including its design, development, analysis, presentation, measurement, evaluation, production,...

    Have you read Where the Wild Things Are? The storybook has fluidity of content and design figured out. It goes that one night, protagonist Max “wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind or another.” He hammers nails into walls, pesters a small dog. Author Maurice Sendak doesn’t explain these hijinks textually for the reader. The mischievous acts are illustrated on the right-hand pages. Readers make the narrative connections for themselves. Photo of the...

    As a Web designer, I often find myself building WordPress-based websites that will ultimately be updated and maintained by clients who have little to no experience working with HTML. While the TinyMCE rich-text editor is great for giving Web content managers of any skill level the tools they need to easily style and publish their posts to a degree, creating anything beyond a single column of text with a few floated images generally requires at least a basic...

    Google Search likes simple, easy-to-crawl websites. You like dynamic websites that show off your work and that really pop. But search engines can’t run your JavaScript. That cool AJAX routine that loads your content is hurting your SEO. Google’s robots parse HTML with ease; they can pull apart Word documents, PDFs and even images from the far corners of your website. But as far as they’re concerned, AJAX content is invisible. The Problem With AJAX AJAX has...

   Content strategy is a beast with many heads, names and trajectories. To approach it is to be sucked in full force. Even so, as crucial as content strategy is, conveying its gravity to a big audience, or to key administrators, is often hard. Being so inherently complex, it’s often easiest to tackle by example. My first job as a Web content writer involved creating a campaign that promoted holiday spending and travel. I came up with clever tag lines that incorporated lyrics from Bing Crosby Christmas jingles. I thought I was doing great work, and when I got an...

   Earlier in the month we posed a question to our readers, asking them about an aspect of UX design and how important this element was on their sites. We got some great responses to the query, and as the month wraps up, so does this discussion about the importance of content strategy. Here we have taken the replies that we got to the post and the discussion that was had, and molded it into a useful post that discusses the ins and outs of creating and implementing a content strategy for your sites. It was easy to see right off the bat from the responses that having...

   Looking for some cool new (and free) jQuery slider plug-ins and scripts? Then here is the perfect round-up created just for you. Here, we have collected the best of the freshest jQuery plug-ins for creating amazing image and content sliders. Because all of these plug-ins come with different functionality, this guide should help you figure out which one suits you best. Let’s go! jQuery Image And Content Sliders Cloud Carousel (demo | download) Here is a 3-D carousel, with optional auto-reflection that doesn’t require images to be modified or server code to...