The content strategy of a website should guide your plans for the what, where and when of content creation. Content is why people visit websites and the website content strategy should be conducted with a content-first approach. It’s very common when building a website to focus on the design of the website, rather than the content itself. Let’s face it, the design of a website is the fun stuff. However, content is slightly more important. The design of a website is subjective to one's taste, while the content of a website is objective.

A website should have defined goals. I have found in my experience that content administrators either don’t have a goal or have a broad goal for their website. A higher education website should answer the why and how, explaining the value of a degree and how to obtain that degree. Our value proposition should be unique from other schools so that we can differentiate from our competitors. In other words, why is a degree from Blinn College more valuable than a degree from Vista College down the street? Why does starting your academic career plan at Blinn College, and then transferring to Texas A&M, make more financial sense? I believe that a higher education website should be a marketing tool and not simply a reference directory. This needs to be prominent on the website and weaved throughout the content. I also believe that any website should make sure that the content is targeted and relevant to the people you want to reach.

In my experiences, I have found that higher education websites tend to think about what they want to say instead of what their audience wants to read. It’s essential to create content for your website with your various audiences in mind and think about what’s most important to them, since that is what your content is truly for. A higher education website audience should be the future student, the current student and the community. The content of a higher education website should have content that caters to each audience, and should answer your audience questions, educate them on the process of enrolling, and address their pain points.

The key to having a strong web content strategy is keeping it relevant to your audiences. This means constantly evaluating and tracking the performance of all the content. We need to look at which pages are being shared, which pages are getting the most views versus those not getting much traction, and how long visitors are spending on each page. This will help determine where we are resonating with our audiences and delivering valuable content, and where we need to do things differently.

All these things, in my opinion, are critical to a successful website content strategy.

To share an experience, I was hired by Blinn College in 2016 to migrate the current website content into a Content Management Website (CMS). Blinn College was using Dreamweaver at the time, which is a website development software tool and not a CMS tool. The content of the site was updated by one person based on submissions from an online form for website content updates. Working with stakeholders of the website, we selected Hannon Hill’s Cascade as the CMS platform for the site. I quickly realized that this wasn’t going to be a simple migration of current content into a CMS platform, but rather a total review of the website with a content-first approach. I worked with departments, divisions, and programs to review their content. Before creating new content, we needed to determine what content we already had and where we saw holes that needed to be filled. We also needed to determine what content needed to be re-written, what pieces of content were performing well, and to document all of the content to identify what needed to stay or be removed. We essentially built the current website from scratch.

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