Taming Content Chaos: A Guide to Dealing with the Inevitable Crunch

OK, here’s the situation: You’re going to redesign your website. Your current site was built a while ago, and you want a new way to tell your story: a beautifully designed experience that draws people in, nudges them toward clarity and action. You go ahead and hire an agency to understand what’s special about your organization and then design something shiny and new.

You start the project, and it’s exciting. There are fun meetings, and you see cool designs and new ways of working. But at some point along the way, it hits you — you’re going to have to deal with content. Cue the rain clouds.

The fact is, content is everything on the web. They used to say “Content is king,” and despite the gendered language, the sentiment is true.

Content guides how we tell stories, how we present ideas, how we communicate emotion. But content is often overlooked or left until the last minute. Content is usually collected or written by people with full-time jobs who find themselves mired in chaos and terrible deadlines, causing frustration and rushing.

You can outsource content development and writing, but it can get expensive, and ultimately, content development is always going to be a collaboration. If lack of bandwidth creates delays, it can make the project stretch out and cost everyone money.

But fear not — it doesn’t have to be so painful. In this post, we talk about how we think about content and how we manage the chaos of the project, from understanding the full scope of content to choosing the right tools and processes.

Understanding Content

When we think of web content, our minds often jump straight to text on a page, but content is so much more than that. Content includes images, graphics, iconography, video, audio, infographics, and even stuff that visitors rarely or never see, such as metadata. Each element plays a crucial role in creating the user’s experience.

Images can help break up long blocks of text, making your content more visually appealing and easier to digest. Videos can provide a more interactive and immersive way to convey information, while infographics can help simplify complex topics and make them more accessible to a wider audience. Metadata is responsible for making sure that people find your site and can access the information when they get there.

To create a truly effective website, it's essential to consider all types of content from the outset of your project. This means taking a holistic view of your content strategy, and ensuring that each element works together to support your overall goals and message. Then we have to consider who is going to find or generate each content element — and when.

Managing Expectations

One of the keys to avoiding content chaos is setting clear expectations from the beginning with yourself and your team.

Content development is a separate phase in our website project, with its own dedicated timeline and assigned resources. This helps ensure that content gets the attention it deserves, and doesn't get lost in the shuffle of other project tasks. What we do is create a website strategy first, which is a plan based on our assessment of the existing and planned content. But things don’t get really real until this content phase.

We structure content development into 2-week sprints, so we can make the process manageable. How many sprints depends on the size of the project and who’s going to be creating the content.

By establishing expectations early and creating those detailed plans, we avoid last-minute scrambles and ensure a smoother overall process. This means that we have frank discussions with our clients about the role of content in the project, and what will be required from them in terms of time and resources. It also means building in adequate buffer time for revisions and approvals, so that the content phase doesn't become a bottleneck for the rest of the project.

Choosing the Right Tools

When it comes to managing content, having the right collaborative tools in place can make all the difference. A tool like Google Docs allows multiple team members to work on the same document simultaneously, leaving comments and suggestions in real-time. An important part of the process for us is reviewing the content that our clients create. This can be a great way to get everyone on the same page and ensure that content is being developed in a consistent and cohesive way. It’s a learning process, and not a simple one, so we manage expectations there, too.

The problem with Google Docs is that you’re developing content for a visual medium. We can put images in Google Docs, but it’s unwieldy and difficult to see things contextually. We've found that a design tool like Figma offers a more visual and intuitive approach to content management.

Figma is a collaborative interface design tool that allows teams to create and share designs in real-time. Our designers — and most web designers today — use it, but we’ve found that it's not just for designers. It's an incredibly powerful tool for content development as well.

In Figma, we create what we call "content layouts." We take our content outlines and create wireframe-like components in Figma that showcase all the content fields needed for each page, including metadata like page titles, meta descriptions, and alt tags for images. This visual representation allows us to experiment with different imagery alongside the copy, creating a more impactful experience for the user. Plus, having everything laid out in one place makes it easier to spot gaps or inconsistencies in the content. They’re like storyboards when making a movie. Because the elements of the content layouts are modular, they can be moved around or dropped in when new ideas pop up.

Figma also makes it easy to collaborate. Key internal audiences can be invited to view and comment on the content layouts directly in Figma, which keeps everyone aligned and ensures that feedback is captured in one centralized place.

This visual approach allows you to catch issues that might not be apparent in a text-only document. When you can see how the different elements of your content work together visually, it's easier to create a cohesive and engaging narrative for your users.

Once our clients start using it, they see the possibilities and the process gets more fluid and productive.

Invest the Time and Effort

Content doesn't have to be chaotic. By understanding the full scope of content at the onset, coming to terms early on about roles and expectations, choosing the right tools, and taking a visual approach, you can tame the content chaos and set your website project up for success.

A well-structured, visually engaging content strategy can be the difference between a website that falls flat and one that truly resonates with your audience. So don't let content be an afterthought — give it the attention it deserves from day one. By putting content at the forefront of your website project, you can create a more impactful, effective, and ultimately successful end result.