Less Content... In Presentations

by Danielle Cooley

So says Idan Gazit, about 3/4 of the way down the page in his post on Designing Presentations.

Forcing yourself to ruthlessly trim your slide content is the best way to evaluate what really matters to your message. Can you cut the slide or merge it with another one? Is there a better combination of words to illustrate the point you’re making?
Less content also has another nice side effect: you can make your text large. Enormous is good—people in the back are often quite far from the projector screen. Make their lives easier and they’re more apt to give you their attention.
Don’t bother with clipart, animation, and other little visual embellishments. Better to have something clean, typographical, and timeless than a powerpoint cliché.

4 out of 5 Content Strategists agree...

by Danielle Cooley

Lots of good stuff here, but definitely check out Ken Yau's segment (starts at 00:38).

There should be justification for things existing. (1:04)

Practical content strategy tips from the experts at Content Strategy Applied 2011 conference (and beyond). Here's the blog post to go with it: http://fionacullinan.com/2011/01/content-strategy-18-practical-tips-in-8-minutes/ And the conference website: http://contentstrategyapplied.eu/

Thanks to Fiona Cullinan for putting it together. (And to Sulman Mirza for tweeting about it! I missed this when it first went out.)

http://fionacullinan.com/2011/01/content-strategy-18-practical-tips-in-8-minutes/

Organize, organize, organize.

by Danielle Cooley

When dealing with hoarding, the solution is usually a combination of purging and organization.

Almost definitely, you need less content. But you need to keep some of it. Sometimes what you need to keep is still a lot of stuff. And you need to organize it well - not just dump everything on one page.

Good organization promotes usability and usefulness AND improves SEO, compared to the "dump everything on one page" method.

Excellent point, @uxPerfection!

Kansas State University Libraries Case Study (Part 3)

by Danielle Cooley

Part 3 of a three-part guest post from Tara Coleman, Joelle Pitts, and Harish Maringanti.

Where we are now

You’re probably wondering how many pages we have now - approximately 1354 pages. We’re doing much better but we still have a long way to go. We have a couple of things in the works that will greatly decrease our page numbers.

This de-cluttering process helped us to address the information architecture needs of our library and put the focus on the customer. Additionally we were able to define the role of content creators and provide appropriate tools for their workflows. As a result, we stopped hoarding content in a static, all purpose website and started creating content in more dynamic, purpose driven systems such as libguides, archon, etc. The Scream Test method also helped prevent us from further diluting the K-State Libraries branding by migrating out-of-date, internal, or value-less content to the new CMS. So in the end, it took three not-so-easy steps to get to the point where we can finally heave content without the emotional breakdown, but the clean(er) house is absolutely worth it!

Redesigned Kansas State University Libraries Web site.

========================

Did you miss Part 1 (why they did it) or Part 2 (the problem and approach) of this case study?

Have questions? Post below or contact the authors directly: