Plan content
Content planning results in quality content and can save time creating content.
Summary: Before you start writing, plan. It can save you time, and result in better content for your users.
Planning helps create useful, relevant, quality content. It helps writers, reviewers and approvers identify the content purpose, scope and audience.
Don’t rely on the content approval process to shape your organisation’s content – it aims to minimise risk and is probably too late to fix problems properly.
Use a planning process
Every piece of content should be planned. Your planning process could include these steps:
- research
- discuss research findings
- analyse the information collected
- produce an outline
- start writing.
These steps can be useful for keeping existing content relevant and updated.
1. Do some research
For each page/piece of content, document its:
- purpose or focus
- reason for publishing – to support a program, project, service or product?
- user groups – who is it for?
- task, decision or goal user is trying to get done
- keywords or terminology familiar to users
- content sources – publications or subject matter experts?
- other existing data – search terms, customer service reps, social media channels?
- information architecture – where in the site structure will this content sit?
2. Discuss your research
Share your findings with everyone involved in publishing content – the content owner or approver, reviewers, publisher or web team.
They can add their expertise and it may save drafting/reviewing time. If everyone understands why you are creating a piece of content you can avoid changed meanings at review time or introducing ROT (repetition, outdated or irrelevant, trivial info).
3. Analyse the information you’ve collected
Review everything. Make sure you’re clear on your topic, focus and users’ needs.
If opinions differed during discussions, make sure you get feedback on your outline (step 4).
4. Produce an outline
Your outline should:
- list the items or issues the content needs to cover (in dot points)
- group the items into topics or sections
- order the groups
- label each group with a heading.
Check that nothing is missing.
Decide if you need to split the content into two or more pages. Separate pages may help when the information relates to different tasks or target audiences.
Getting feedback on your outline can save time later. But you can skip this step if your brief is simple and the approach you discussed with everyone was agreed.
5. Start writing
Once you have a clear idea of your purpose, audience and so on, you’re ready to start writing your first draft.
Resources
Use our handy resources to plan your content: