Content Strategy Best Practices

Course Description

Is your audience engaging with the content on your website? Get ahead of the game by learning how to create, mobilize, and govern content that is user-centric, engaging, and accessible for your audiences.

This course will give you hands-on experience incorporating best practices for content creation, governance, and strategy into your new or existing website. We'll guide you through the basics, common issues and teach you how to ideate, create, plan, implement, and deploy high-quality content to leverage your site’s traffic and user engagement.

Learning Objectives

You'll have exercises to complete between live sessions, access to a Slack channel and a one-on-one session to help you out.

• Content strategy fundamentals and key terms 
• Criteria and methods to assess and optimize your content and its organization
• Applicable strategies to develop and test information architecture and content models
• Content governance crafting, planning, and implementation for the long run 
• Best practices for well-written and accessible content 

Outline

Throughout the training, we'll work on exercises that will walk us through:

• Setup & Introductions
• Content strategy fundamentals
• Content organization and optimization strategies
• Workflows and tools for content governance 
• Best practices for accessible and well-written content 
• Wrap-Up

Background and Prerequisites

• This course is for you if you are working with a website that has potential, but you’re looking for more ways to bring more engagement with your audiences
• This course is not for you if you’re already familiar with developing content strategy and organization plans for your website
• Technical requirements include access to Google Analytics for your website, and admin permissions to install software
• Trainees should set aside about 2 hours between live sessions to review materials and prepare exercises

Who Will Gain the Most From This Training?

This course is ideal for content writers, editors, and managers, as well as web communications and social media managers who are looking to improve the quality and impact of their content strategy. 

Meet Your Instructors

Kate Bundy knows what it’s like to be in the shoes of a website manager and content creator in higher education, and she’s passionate about improving the quality, engagement, and accessibility of digital experiences on the Web. Kate is an experienced educator with a PhD from McGill University who loves to empower curiosity, learning, and collective problem solving with hands-on practice and critical reflection. Known for her positive and encouraging approach, participation is central during sessions, and all questions are welcome! 

Adrienne Smith has a masters in Information Studies and has been working in the digital content strategy space for the past ten years. Her areas of expertise include information architecture, taxonomies, metadata and governance. She’s coached multiple cohorts of professionals to take their content skills to the next level, in addition to regularly speaking at industry conferences. Her teaching philosophy is hands-on and privileges practical applications of theory.