Content Design
An older but still useful argument for treating content as a core part of product experience rather than surface copy.
When I used to design sites for my own small clients, I eventually settled on a very crude Content Strategy approach, in an earnest attempt to extract the information I needed to make an intelligent design.
I would ask clients to email me with a written description of their (say) homepage, containing between 5–7 "messages", and to put a priority on each message. Something like this (with priorities numbered in brackets):
Welcome to Company X: We make awesome (1) Buy This (2) Buy That (2) Read This (3) Read This (3) Read This Also (3) And Read this (3) Click here (4)
I made it clear there can be only one number one priority. But you can have multiple twos and threes, for example. It's a very crude system, but it really helped me to lay out the information. And it really helped to avoid rounds of changes.
The clients still often perceived these "messages" like post — something to be delivered. Akin to stating "Here is my house" to a neighbour, and not expecting a reply. And often no thread would tie these "messages" into a coherent discourse. Akin to a rambling drunk, obsessed with his own belongings.
You see, I really like to believe clients want to talk with their customers, not at them. And I see a web page as a thread of conversation. Or, at the very least, if a client doesn't want to converse with a customer, at least tell a good story, right?
This may sound obvious now, but this was before Content Strategy or even UX had really taken off.
Even now I still find most clients — even very large ones (or especially very large ones) — are still lacking a very clear content strategy: this is like speaking before thinking, and my father had some very concise idioms to describe this behaviour in small boys.
I write this post with the simple desire to add more weight to the balance very much for thinking before speaking, very much for content strategy before all else.
So, please, clients and content strategists, let's work together to change machine-gun messaging: "so that, through a learned discourse, we may rise above the savage, and closer to god".