I have a good explanation– I’ve been making a lot of behind-the-scenes changes to this website. Phase One is now complete– we’ve migrated to a new server and we’re operating on a new CMS. These changes, which are for the most part not immediately visible, are extremely exciting to me. I hope these changes will make this website even more accessible and easy for visitors to use.

Please, take a look around and tell me what you think! If you see something that isn’t working perfectly, or have a suggestion for improvement, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

In the meantime, we’re getting started on Phase Two: some design and usability tweaks. I am especially excited about these changes, and I think they’ll be pretty readily detectable by return visitors. Stay tuned for some exciting new developments!

Meanwhile, here is some of what I have been writing lately for the NASA website:
Ohio Astronaut Lands at Glenn
New Assignments, New Responsibilities Proposed for Glenn
Tiny Technology with a Big Heart

It has been a busy fall and early winter. I’ve been wrapping up some great projects (more to come soon) as well as writing lots of stories for the NASA Glenn website.

Here are a few of them:

Astronauts Test Glenn Exercise Harnesses

Metallic Foam Reduces Airplane Noise

Glenn Helps Ares I-X Soar
Thanks for reading, see you in 2010!

I apologize for the radio silence for the past few weeks, but I have been busy acclimatizing to my new position.

I am happy to announce that I am now working as a Web Content Creator for S.G.T. Inc, at NASA Glenn Research Center! I work on the web team creating all manner of copy for NASA Glenn. It’s an exciting place to work, and an exciting field!

We have just posted my first feature web story on the NASA Glenn site. The story is about Glenn’s role in the upcoming Ares I-X flight test launch, which is the first flight test of any hardware in the Constellation Program (NASA’s plan to continue space exploration.)

I’ll be back to my regularly scheduled posts now, which will include links to my work at NASA.

Thanks for reading!

Of course not. And no one would blame you. It’s not a cracking of the chestnut of judging a book by its cover—rather, it’s judging a book for what it contains. Judging it by its content. And if the content isn’t solid, no reader will stick around.

I recently stumbled upon an article on the website A List Apart, and it contains one of the most intriguing, smartest articles I have read about content strategy and web content creation. In her piece “The Discipline of Content Strategy,” Kristina Halvorson writes:

“Until we commit to treating content as a critical asset worthy of strategic planning and meaningful investment, we’ll continue to churn out worthless content in reaction to unmeasured requests. We’ll keep trying to fit words, audio, graphics, and video into page templates that weren’t truly designed with our business’s real-world content requirements in mind. Our customers still won’t find what they’re looking for. And we’ll keep failing to publish useful, usable content that people actually care about.

“Stop pretending content is somebody else’s problem. Take up the torch for content strategy. Learn it. Practice it. Promote it. It’s time to make content matter.”

This is expressed so eloquently, and describes a real-world problem in accurate, easily digestible yet profound terms. So much of the content on the web is, simply stated, not good. Much of it runs the range from forgettable and ineffective to appallingly bad. Some web sites that offer merely mediocre content seem to shine in comparison, simply because the content isn’t awful.

I think we can do better. The world is full of eager writers—smart people who can turn a phrase artfully and draw a reader in. Regrettably, many writers still view the web as an enemy, a passing phase or an irritant. I would urge those writers to keep an open mind. Every day, my appreciation and passion for interactive communication grows. There are so many unique benefits to communicating online; the ability to immediately interact with audiences, the capability to reach a wider group of readers and the leisure of unlimited space are all siren songs that this writer can’t resist.

I’m all about taking up the torch for content strategy. To me, the flame is exciting, challenging, rewarding—and fun.

How do you feel about web content—creating it, consuming it, judging it? Comment below.

All of these facets of website design and development are interrelated, and each of them interacts and influences content decisions.

The examples are limitless. If the design of a website calls for teeny tiny text, in a funky font color on a busy background, that is going to influence how people receive your content. You could feature the most moving and powerful prose the Internet has ever seen, but if readers can’t read it, it’s irrelevant.

Proper web content isn’t simply engaging, informative and well written (although it should be all of these things.) Great web content works for you in more ways than just communicating with your reader—it’s enriched by strategic key word placement, it’s influenced by matters of organic search engine optimization (SEO). Great content can bring people to the site by working with current technology, and then it can entice readers to stay longer, because of the value of the information.

The fascinating field of usability is quite intricately interwoven with content creation and management. From the elementary to the advanced, usability (how a visitor uses a website) should be taken into consideration in every aspect of a web site.

From macro to micro, usability and content strategy are symbiotic arrows in the same quiver, employed for accomplishing the same bulls eye hit. Even seemingly smaller choices, such as whether or not to use ‘click here’ in links*, have huge ramifications in the efficacy of the content and the website at large.

Usability, content strategy, web design and interactive marketing are constantly changing and developing. It’s not enough to read a book on the topic of the web and consider yourself an expert. In order to understand the web, you must immerse yourself in it, daily, and develop a first-hand perspective and informed opinion.

The best and most talented web folk I know are voracious learners who are inspired by the constant evolution of their medium. They feel challenged and intrigued by the daily innovations and newness of the field. They find it exciting. And the best web teams have an innate sense of how important each element is. They work together in the most genuine sense of the word. And together, they create.

*I’ve recently been examining and exploring this topic. It seems logical that in most cases, “Click Here” isn’t a great way to label links. Especially if there’s no further information, simply stating “click here” offers no value or clear direction to a reader. But, if it’s coupled with info, great action words and clarity, is “Click Here” sometimes OK?  This informative article says no (and the comments offer a vigorous debate.) I’d love to hear what you think—comment below.

This great blog entry on Ektron’s website brought the topic to my mind. Matthew Sullivan blogs, “It’s not just upcoming events, customer lists, or press releases you need to author, but you also need to consider the “freshness” of everything else. Product pages can easily stagnate after a launch or campaign. With a good content management strategy in place, you can continually update your product descriptions, and change page layouts.”

While initially this might seem like a daunting obstacle to overcome, it can actually be a huge asset and opportunity when viewed in the right light. When you’re creating a sculpture or a painting, at some point, it’s done. You step away and frame or exhibit or sell the work. But web content is never “finished.” Even when you have published a new blog or a web page, you can always go back and refine and update the text.

Have you ever created a print brochure or other collateral material, and ordered a large print run? It makes sound economic sense, but sometimes within a few months, the information is unexpectedly dated. Maybe it’s not necessarily  “wrong” but it isn’t exactly “right” anymore. Or perhaps, with new developments or initiatives at your company, the copy could be an even more accurate and engaging representation of your product or your company. But you’re stuck. You either continue working with the already printed material, or craft new copy and go through the entire printing expense again.

That’s the great thing about the web. It costs virtually nothing to revisit and optimize web copy that was already written. You can easily, as one of my favorite journalism professors liked to say, “Make good better.”

Fresh, current and engaging content not only satisfies the ever-evolving needs of the bots. New content keeps your readers, and your clients, coming back to your site as a trusted outlet where they can find the relevant information that the need.  And more readers and clients mean more business—well worth the investment of time to keep your content up-to-date and fresh.

This truth is well known and all-too-well understood by writers of every description. Reporters have to sniff out their story before they can worry about snappy leads. Poets must find that inspiring moment before they start wrangling metaphors. And web writers—bloggers, content developers, even Facebook and Twitter users—must first discern their topic before they sit down to write.

The best status updates or tweets are informational and insightful in nature. They might contain a link to an enlightening article, an entertaining video, a light bulb realization that struck the writer while sitting in a meeting.

Writer 1: “I ate a ham sandwich for lunch.” While this post is informational, it is certainly not enlightening. The most useless updates and tweets are simply statements of the mundane detritus of every day life, devoid of any context or quest for meaning.

Writer 2: “Just enjoyed a ridiculously tasty croque monsieur at L’Albatros. Gooey, melted fromage, tender ham, crisp bread. Perfection. Check it out!” This is both informational and insightful—and actionable. Anyone in that writer’s network now knows where to go for a smashing sandwich.

The difference between those two updates (besides the use of “telling detail”, thanks Creative Writing 101) is that while both started out with a piece of information—a ham sandwich—writer 2 pushed the information to the next level. That post actually shows an opinion. The second writer actually has something to say, something on which to write—as opposed to writing just for the sake of writing (or tweeting for the sake of tweeting.)

The same theory applies for blogging and web content writing. The best blog entries actually put something new into the world and provide an insight. The best web content is, in addition to being engaging and exciting, of practical use. The zenith of web content is usable information.

Not sure what to write about on your website or blog? This great post on Small Business Trends identifies sources of possible story generators, like WordTracker and Google Trends. If you collaborate with a content generator in an informed manner, the usefulness and effectiveness of your content can reach new echelons.

I find a lot of great links that inspire me to write these posts on Twitter. If you blog or write, where do you find your ideas?

One could say, at a most basic level:

Content strategists employ content strategy to strategically optimize their web content. And that would be accurate, albeit repetitive and pedantic. But it doesn’t represent the nuances of content strategy.

I’ve been on a quest to create my own working definition for content strategy. Every day I discover interesting blog posts, insightful articles and helpful tweets that are contributing to my definition’s evolution. Today’s particularly thought-provoking definition comes courtesy of this post on the blog I’d Rather be Writing.

Tom Johnson writes, “Content strategy can seem like a fuzzy concept because it encompasses so much. But this all-encompassing quality is part of the definition of content strategy — the content strategist looks at all content, not just a slice of the pie. It easily includes metadata, taxonomy, search engine optimization, information architecture, user interface, multimedia, company presence, social media, web copy, product announcements, semantics, wireframes, and more.”

I love this definition. I’m both intrigued and challenged by the ephemeral nature of content strategy, but here this “fuzziness” is presented as an inherent part of the definition, rather than something to be overcome in seeking the definition. Continuing this way of thinking, the very fact that countless articles and posts and tweets are devoted to defining content strategy is in itself part of the definition of content strategy.

So in seeking the definition, and in writing about it, I also become part of the evolving definition.

Become part of the definition—leave a comment below.

Every year I look forward to the class of new words that Merriam-Webster anoints as sanctioned, official words. (I was borderline giddy when ‘ginormous’ made the cut.) My friend’s blog post alerted me that this year’s crop has just been released.

I’m quite taken with some of the words selected—locavore, frenemy, staycation.  I’m surprised that some selections are only now being legitimized—carbon footprint, fan fiction, zip line. Some words are completely from other languages, like shawarma, and I find it pleasantly indicative of the continual melting-pot nature of English that such words are now included.

Unsurprisingly, many words relate to technology and Internet communication—vlog, webisode, flash mob. It’s another indication of how dramatically the web influences how we communicate, and how essential it is for content drivers to keep up to speed, and ahead of the curve, on the information super highway.