For my day job, I’ve been doing a lot of what’s called content design. Content is everywhere, and that includes in software products, as technical documentation, in emails, on marketing websites, and more. For authors, it can be useful to think about content design, since it also involves SEO and search, measuring the effectiveness of content you put out there, and creating content that is easily accessible to everyone.
With that in mind, here are some resources that I’ve come across:
“What is Content Engineering?” on Simple A: “Content engineering is the practice of organizing the shape, structure, and application of content. Content engineering is broken down into seven primary disciplines: model, metadata, markup, schema, taxonomy, topology, and graph.”
“Schema Markup SEO Best Practice” on SEO Works: How to enhance your articles in search results.
“Getting started with schema.org using Microdata” on schema.org: “Schema.org provides a collection of shared vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages in ways that can be understood by the major search engines: Google, Microsoft, Yandex and Yahoo!”
“UI Copy: UX Guidelines for Command Names and Keyboard Shortcuts” on NN Group: “Labels for commands should be brief, informative, rely on verbs and adjectives, and avoid branded terms. Command shortcuts must limit the number of modifiers and follow standard conventions.” (Good things to keep in mind for author websites as well)
“Measurement Framework: How to Document Content Marketing ROI” on NewsCred: Define a business outcome for your content.
“The Human Cost of Tech Debt” on Dead Tech: More geared toward companies, but still nice to keep in mind that you want your projects to be concise.
WAVE: A web accessibility evaluation tool.
“Strategy Needs Good Words” on Martin Weigel: “At the end of the day, strategy is the art of getting other people to do something. In the pursuit of that, narrative (call it ‘storytelling’ if you really must) is the strategist’s tool.”
“Create Blog-Book Synergy to Reduce Content Creation Stress” on How to Blog a Book: Good ideas for how to repurpose your existing content.
“Copywriting: The Definitive Guide” on Backlinko: A guide to writing content to help you get more website traffic and sales.
“4 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Find Content Ideas” on Search Engine Journal: Use data to figure out what content your audience wants.
And for fun:
“The best stats you’ve ever seen” (a TED Talk)
Collapsible markdown in GitHub, and an example
