As we know, dealing with content is a messy, complicated, and expensive business, and sometimes it’s just not possible to take things as far as you’d like. Is there a quicker (and whisper it softly: cheaper) way to reveal those weaknesses and gaps, discover those pressure points, and still make some considered recommendations as to the ideal path ahead? I believe that, through a combination of small-scale auditing, testing, and interviewing, you can go some way to achieving just that.

Genetically inherited – or acquired through illness, accident or poisoning – colour blindness is a condition affecting approximately 8% of men and 1% of women in developed nations. The absence or altered sensitivity of one of the three cone receptors at the back of your eyes causes the individual difficulty in distinguishing certain colours from one another. While not a disability, the condition can at times be frustrating. I’m sure anyone with a form of colour blindness has fielded many a ‘what colour does this pencil look to you?’ question ad nauseam.

Trying to bang the web content strategy drum from within an organisation is not without its ups and downs – rather like a game of snakes and ladders. There will be occasions when you believe the message has sunk in. But all it can take is a loss of key personnel, momentum, or courage to send you tumbling back down again.

When it’s your own website, blog or social media profile you can usually take as long as you need to publish something. Not always healthy but by and large the pressure (externally anyway) is off. It’s when you’re tasked with publishing content for an organisation with a far larger online reach and responsibility that the pressure is cranked up a notch or twelve and those self-doubting questions receive more airtime within the confines of your brain.

Another week, another Explain IA entry. After last week’s attempt at explaining information architecture using only 140 characters the temptation was there to try something a little different.

This week, as part of the IA Institute’s Explain IA contest, I attempted to explain the practice of information architecture using only the amount of characters that would squeeze into a single tweet.

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.