When planning a website (either from scratch or revising an existing one), it is important to think about content. What you produce, in what format, how often and how you manage the process internally will have a big impact on your website’s success. A content strategy is a useful approach to help you plan communications that are timely, interesting and relevant to your visitors.
Here’s a basic content strategy for WordPress sites that you can use to plan for your new site based on the following four areas:
- Substance
- Structure
- Workflow
and - Guidance
1. Substance
What type of content will you produce and what is the topic? Content usually consists of text, images and videos. However, you may also want to include audio, PDFs or other types of content.
When it comes to what you are going to write about, a good first step is to carry outkeyword research: what are you doing? What search terms do you want to be found under? What is the competition for these keywords? Which terms does it make sense to target in a methodical way?
2. Structure
The structural part of the website content strategy is probably the most complex. It’s not just about what’s on your site, but how it all fits together. It can make the difference between giving your visitors an intuitive and clear journey around your site and leaving a visitor without a path to continue their journey on your site when they your latest news: a lost opportunity.
Site map
What will the actual layout of your website look like? Usually, this will be more or less reflected in the navigation structure of the site. Some pages may be deliberately left as individual links in the footer or as hidden pages. Here is an example:
- Home
- About
- News & Events
- Articles (individual news items)
- Products and services
- Our services
- Contact us for more information
- Site map
- General terms and conditions
- Privacy policy
Post types
WordPress default post types include:
- Pages (static)
- Posts (dynamic)
Post types are a powerful way to extend WordPress – they can be added with extensions or themes and used to group content into larger ‘types’ such as products, articles and portfolio items, where the content type represents an entire section of your site, or where it needs to include custom metadata (see more below) to make the content type specific to its purpose.
Customised meta
Custom meta is additional structured data outside of what the WordPress CMS typically provides for posts. Custom meta can simply be a text field such as “Job Title” for a custom post type, such as “Team Member”. It can also be more complicated like a colour picker, date picker, image uploader or series of checkboxes. You can think of “custom meta” as a way of customising WordPress to make it easier to input more detailed information or more complicated data
Glossary
Static content: Many pages on your site will be “static” pages, such as “About” or “Contact Us”, pages that remain constant unless manually changed through the system. Static pages are created and managed through WordPress admin pages. Some of the static pages may also contain dynamic content (posts) or content from other sources such as embedded videos, tweets or photos.
Dynamic content is designed to be added, updated or removed on a regular basis, usually in the form of a feed, such as a blog or news archive. Taxonomies such as categories and tags are used to manage dynamic content.
Taxonomies
Taxonomies are used to create groups or archives of posts. WordPress includes two built-in taxonomies (categories and tags) for managing posts. Just as it’s easy to add custom post types in WordPress, it’s also easy to add custom taxonomies. So if you’ve added a new post type called ‘Music Reviews’, you can also add a new taxonomy called ‘Genre’ so you can see all the posts you’ve created in the ‘Jazz’ archive.
Relationships
Like taxonomies, post relationships can be used to create relationships between posts. Unlike taxonomies, post relationships allow you to associate posts with each other without any specific classification system. For example, if you want to create a ‘related posts’ section at the end of a blog post, but want to be specific, then a post relationship extension could be used.
Templates
Simply put, templates are used by WordPress to display content. A page template displays page content, a blog template displays blog feed, etc.
But it’s actually a bit more complicated than that. Often, one or more templates can be applied to one or more post types. For example, static pages can use a number of templates such as ‘full width’, ‘contact page’ and ‘home page’. Similarly, a single list template can be used to manage blog feed, category archive and search results. In addition, many post types require two templates – a list template and a display template for individual posts.
A typical website built with WordPress may include some of these and more:
- Home page
- Static page (default template)
- News listing page
- Display of individual posts
- Contact page
3. Workflow
Things to keep in mind:
- Set goals for your content production
- Plan workflows and processes such as planning, drafting, finalising and publishing content
- Utilise the same content across multiple types of media – blog posts, tweets, YouTube videos, etc.
- Simple, automated ways to syndicate content
A website works best when everyone in the company feels engaged with it and wants to contribute to it in some way. It could be your product team talking about a new feature in the latest version of the product, an opinion piece from management, or the announcement of a major new customer from the sales team. WordPress is built to facilitate this kind of decentralised contribution to the site.
But without someone keeping an editorial eye on things, you might find that the overall company message is all over the place, your product development team can’t spell, your sales team thinks it’s acceptable to use profanity in a blog post, and management doesn’t know how to use bullet points correctly.
4. Guidance
Some form of content governance is a good idea to ensure that blogging/content production is consistent and in line with your strategy and objectives.
What does it mean in practice? It’s about giving someone responsibility for regularly reviewing what’s happening with your site’s content. It’s also worth reviewing your static content from time to time to make sure it’s still accurate. More frequently, you should look at how people react to your current content. If you put a lot of energy into writing blog posts or case studies, does anyone read them? Did any of them lead to conversions? What were the most popular posts last month? How can you use these insights to make next month’s blog posts even more successful?
Some elements of governance will be used in your workflows as your editor will need to give the site’s contributors feedback to help them improve their content over time.
Summing up
This article introduces the idea of a content strategy and gives you a starter template for planning a website specifically for WordPress. Whether you’re preparing this as an Angry Creative client or not, we’d love to hear your thoughts. Contact us if you’d like to talk to us about a content strategy with WordPress.An introduction to content strategy for WordPress