How often have we been involved in building websites we knew would fail? Not because we couldn’t deliver on the technical specs, but because we saw it had conceptual flaws or the clients seemed to be improvising along the way! And in some cases, the Drupal agency even gets the blame.

This is what happens if we focus only on the technology of building websites and forget to look at the bigger picture. Content Strategy is one area where we can make a difference. Don’t be intimidated by the new terminology or the army of newborn experts and self declared evangelists speaking on the subject, as content strategy principles are already common sense to most of us, even without knowing.

In this session, I will quickly go over the fundamentals of content strategy, showing that you've been applying many of these for years without necessarily realising. Once we’ve talked about the basics, we can finally address the elephant in the room: how do you tell your client their approach is wrong when it comes to content strategy. Are our business relationships strong enough for that kind of conversation? Maybe if they aren’t we shouldn’t be having those business relationships at all. But that’s another conversation.

Meanwhile, we’ll try to provide a couple of strategies to address this situation. Finally we will share some risk management steps we’ve incorporated in our workflow to help avoid the lack of proper content strategy becoming a liability.

This session aims to:

• describe the basics of content strategy for the web and show this is already common sense to most of us
• provide strategies with which you can guide, challenge and influence content related decisions
• share some best practices in larger web projects to help avoid content strategy inconsistencies