Content, Seriously Consulting Ltd.
Making order from content chaos.
In October 2023, a meeting of a Boye & Co digital leaders community brought together about a dozen people to discuss topics of mutual interest. My role was to present on the topic of artificial intelligence. Because artificial Intelligence is an area that is so wide and so varied, We focused on the aspects that …
One night recently, just before going to bed, I saw a chat message pop up on my screen: Hey, is your website down? I tried to send someone to it but looks like it’s not there.” I let out a big groan and shot off a chat message to the person who maintains my website. …
Accessibility guidelines for digital content turns 10 this year – the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) became an ISO standard in 2012. The start of the W3C initiative was in 1995, with version 1.0 published in 1999. Yes, accessibility standards have been around that long! Yet my industry experience tells me that many development …
What happens inside the content world seems to be opaque and mysterious. Operating models for content are mostly stuck in the 1980s, taking word processing and spreadsheets as far as possible, but woefully inadequate for a world where content goes far beyond “documents”. Content is expected to be componentised, re-used, adapted, reconfigured and repackaged, and …
A recent conversation between a content operations and a Digital Asset Management (DAM) specialist prompted the question: why can’t you just use a DAM to store content? Why would you need a separate authoring environment for content? Good question, right? When should you put content into a DAM, and when should you use some type …
It’s time to get real about how we talk about content technologies, particularly about content management technologies. The content industry has a naming problem. The problem is not just about the semantics of how we name things – the frustration of sitting through a meeting where a group of professionals argue vehemently about “templates” only …
We know from experience that when it comes to personalisation, there are all too many pitfalls. Take this example: “Dear Amazon, I bought a toilet seat because I needed one necessity, not desire. I do not collect them. I am not a toilet seat addict, no matter how temptingly you email me I’m not going …
Headless CMSes won’t solve your content problems. How the headless trends move content complexity upstream. When you do a Google search on the term “content operations”, the first page of results is overwhelmingly made up of ads from headless CMS vendors. To be clear, the vendors themselves have heads; it’s their content management systems that …
This past year has seen a lot of changes, both in personal habits and business practices, and how they affect each other is still a work in progress. On the personal front, we’ve gone from the frenzy of online socialising to a more introspective state. Compared to the first year of the pandemic, where everyone …
Discovery is the first step in any project designed to solve a business problem or to reach a business goal that involves content. The Five Pillars framework is an approach adapted from standard management consulting methods into an inquiry method developed specifically for the discovery phase of content projects. The method draws out the salient information …
It may seem odd to begin the discussion of content and context with data, but stay with me. The importance of having good data hygiene, good reference data sets, and data standards for interoperability is growing as we need to present better visualisations or crunch data in more sophisticated ways. The ability to carry out …
