In last week’s post, I shared some thoughts about the creative direction, art direction, and design for my upcoming new website and where they came from.

Today, I’ll tell you about my new content strategy.

First, a quick primer on what content strategy is (and isn’t). Content strategy isn’t a fancy way to say “words and stuff.” Content strategy is, quite literally, the strategy for your content.

Via content strategist Kristina Halvorson’s wonderful book, Content Strategy for the Web:

Content is what the user came to read, learn, see, or experience.

Brand strategist Mark Pollard says:

Strategy is an informed opinion about how to win.

Together, content strategy is “an informed opinion about how to win with what the user came to read, learn, see, or experience.”

What are you trying to win?

Many designers’ websites suck because they haven’t answered that question.

The goal of a designer’s website

“Win” is a simpler way to say “achieve a stated business goal.” That’s creative direction. This is why there’s a massive overlap between creative direction and content strategy, and it’s why creative directors and content strategist make magic when they work closely together.

The implied “win” for most designers is to either get a full-time job or a client through their website. That’s why the form most designers’ websites take is a portfolio, typically around 4–10 pages: Home, Work/Portfolio, a handful of case studies, About, and Contact. This is also true for most agencies; that number sometimes jumps to 10–20 pages to include things like team bios, news articles, and press releases.

My win is different, so I need a different kind of site; the creative direction and content strategy wills it so. I’m not trying to get a full-time job and I’m not looking to do client work. My businesses make money through selling informational products like courses and books and high-touch implementation help through coaching and consulting. I‘ve learned that a surefire way to do that is to give away a lot of valuable content as a way to build trust with my readers and potential customers.

I can’t do that well in 4–10 pages. My website has about 200 pages, 178 of which are articles. Through a combination of my own instincts, crawling through analytics, and talking to some of my readers and prospective customers both individually and as a a group, I learned that my current site isn’t set up well to help me win here.

That‘s the real driver for needing some changes. The content strategy is fine, but the information architecture and user experience need work. And while I’ve got the hood popped, it’s a good excuse to play with a new art direction.

Information architecture changes

My current site has a few ways to navigate the content, but they all have pretty large downsides.

The primary way is a list of articles, ordered in reverse chronology. That’s great for knowing what’s most recently published, but awful for finding anything good that’s older.

There’s a list of topics on the side, but it’s an unusable list of 139 items. That almost means that every post has its own individual topic! It reveals my lack of a coherent folksonomy; I literally make up new topics at the time of writing when I want to. It’s why you’ll find a topic for “conferences” and a separate one for “conference,” with no overlap between them 🤦🏽‍♂️

If you like my approach to writing about design process & craft, you could go to the “Process” topic page. But, even if it was tagged properly, you wouldn’t find my article about making a portfolio hiring managers can’t deny, one of the most popular articles ever on my site. That’s a problem.

The current site has a section called Products and another section called Free Resources. My original intention was for these sections to have a yin and yang relationship: all of it is my content… just separated between paid and free stuff. But that’s the wrong mental model. Few people really think, “I’d like to pay Dan for something, but I don’t know what,” or “I don’t care what content I find here, as long as it’s free.”

The new site collects all of the content under five specific topics:

1. The Business of Design
2. Design Leadership
3. Design Systems
4. Process & Craft
5. Personal

These “hubs” have a much more straightforward value proposition. I think they’ll better serve the person coming in thinking, “I’d like to learn more about running a design business” or “I’d like to learn more about design process,” and it tees up a mixture of content for them.

For example, the Design Leadership page will collect videos and podcasts where I talk about Design Leadership. It’ll also show 2 different views of the articles I’ve written about Design Leadership: a reverse chronological view so you know what’s the most recent, and a “most popular” view where you can see the top 5 articles not to miss regardless of when they were published.

One of the sections I’m most excited about is books I recommend about each of these topics. I’m an avid reader and there are so many books that do a great job of describing a topic better than I could or have. I’m excited to have a dedicated place where I can store topical book recommendations.

The future of design systems

One other big change I’ll be making is to move all of my design system articles off of this site and over to the Design System University website instead. I’ll still maintain the hub here for a while, but all of the article links will take you offsite.

That’s because I find my audience split between two major buckets: people interested in design systems and people interested in the business side of design. That’s not to say there’s not overlap, but the feedback I’ve received is that the audiences are distinct enough that the content I publish is relevant to half my audience at a time at best.

I’ll be writing a lot more about the business side here in this newsletter and much less about design systems here. If you’re subscribe here because you want design system content, I think you’ll be better served to subscribe to the DSU newsletter instead if you aren’t already.

Coming soon!

I see the light at the end of the tunnel for getting this new site live. I hope it helps you find better content that you’re looking for from me once it’s out. And if there’s any feedback you have about how I can make it even better for you, please do share it!

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