We make your web content work for your users – through research, testing & top-notch writing.
We’ll take apart your content, your navigation, your business processes and your users, and put them back together in a way that’s clear, consistent, useful and useable. Just like messy, really hard magic.
Content strategy
Content strategy is the plan behind the words on your website. It identifies what you’ve got and what you need, ferrets out the people to talk to and the publications to consider, and nails down what you’ll do and how you’ll do it.
A good content strategy informs the beginning of a project and teases out the content, IA and design requirements, but it should also be used to maintain and grow that content once it’s ‘done’. It gives boundaries and intentions to pages, to help focus the words, tools and images that will live inside them.
Information architecture
Information architecture is the design behind your site’s structure. It dictates what things are called, how they relate to each other, and how users will navigate between them.
IA development is an iterative process. We start with a thorough audit of your website and brand material, interview your users and your staff, and then prune, shape and test into a robust structure that reflects what you’ve got, what you need, and what you might want to add in the future.
Writing, editing and content design
Content design is more than copywriting – it’s applying research, user experience and design thinking to how content is written and structured.
It’s wider and deeper than traditional copywriting, because it takes into account:
- the structure of your website as a whole
- data about how each page is being used – from analytics, testing and interviews
- search engine optimisation of key terms
- content models and patterns.
It’s also about writing powerful, to-the-point plain English that tells an organisation’s story in a cohesive, engaging way. Good web writing should get you straight to the heart of what you need to know, speak to you as a target user, and connect you emotionally with a brand.
Search engine optimisation and analytics
SEO used to be a term for a kind of esoteric marketing witchcraft that cost a lot in return for dubious – and often clunky – real value.
To us, SEO is another tool in our user-experience arsenal. The analytics on your page can tell you what your users did once they got to you. Your call centre or conversion funnels can tell you what they failed to do. Testing can tell you what they might do in the future.
SEO tools can tell you what happened to all the potential users you never encountered at all.
User testing and research
We’re big fans of testing early and often, and we don’t just mean formal, moderated hour-long sessions – we also use tools like Treejack and Optimal Sort to check our assumptions with real people at key points in each project.
We’re also very into guerrilla testing, which is a fancy term for “bribing people while they’re waiting in queues”. Best guesses are always still guesses – we get things in front of real humans as often as we possibly can.
Guides and training
To make sure your beautifully-written website stays beautifully written, we’ll set you up with style guides and content models so that anyone in your organisation can create and maintain your content.
We can also provide in-depth training for individuals or small groups – just ask.
Kiwibank’s website is the clear winner in this category. It is laid out and written so that it is immediately clear what they do, who it’s for, and how you can complete the tasks.
PLAIN ENGLISH AWARDS 2011: PEOPLE’S CHOICE
© Copyright 2024, Sixtyproof Ltd.