To bring the curtain down on 2009 I thought I’d share nine of my favourite articles and blog entries of the past year. Whether they’ve helped me learn new methods, question any pre-held beliefs or simply helped me to do my job better; one way or another they’ve all made an impact.

Publishing web content should work like clockwork, but an effective Content Strategy keeps those cogs moving smoothly.

While the severity and symptoms of dyslexia vary from person to person, what can learning more about how some people with dyslexia see the written word help us to create better web content?

Like a musical conductor a content strategy helps to bring order to a complicated task with highly irregular rhythms and frequent shifts in tempo by keeping everyone in time with one another, delivering a consistent sound across all content channels and providing the direction to deliver content in tune to the key user and business goals.

With so much to learn about the business, their market(s) and customers, no matter what the stage the web project’s at when they’re hired, freelance content creators still arrive at the table with so many burning questions.

If complimented by sufficient summaries and visual highlights, infographics can maintain the reader’s interest and, crucially, let them get on with the task in hand. But the options for visualising data don’t necessarily have to start and end with the usual bar charts, pie chart or scatter diagrams – there’s always room for a little imagination.

It seems more people then ever are reading and talking about content strategy. In a recent search for content strategy articles on delicious I was struck by the graph showing a sharp increase in saved bookmarks since the end of last year.

Our clients or employers may think they need a social web presence – purely because they feel they have to. But it’s our responsibility, as part of the development of an overall content strategy, to ascertain whether they have the time, team, budget and heart to keep up such a public publishing strategy.

How do you balance the need for clear conveyance of a brand’s message and services but, at the same time, floating enough buoys in the sea of content to encourage high search engine visibility and traffic? An expert in SEO and marketing can help.

The advent, and subsequent mass adoption, of embedded Flash audio and video content we’ve been exposed to in the last five years or so brings with it many challenges, but none more important than the issue of universal access.