INTRODUCTION

There are people who’ve been structuring content in enterprise settings for more than a decade. I’m not one of them.

I didn’t write this book because I have the most expertise in metadata, or because I’ve led the charge on building single-sourcing solutions for Fortune 500 companies. I wrote this book because I think there are lots of you out there like me: People who care about content, and who have invested countless hours in helping their organizations or clients communicate better, more consistently, more honestly. You’ve audited messy sites, rewritten robotic “about us” pages, restructured navigation, and thought long and hard about how to make things easy to find, read, and use.

And yet, if you’re anything like me, you keep running into the same problem: Your content is stuck. It’s not ready for mobile. It can’t connect to other content on your site, much less elsewhere on the Web. It’s fixed in pages and documents, siloed, and limited to a single access point. I felt like this for a long time. Working as a content strategist in a regional agency, I spent years trying my damnedest to clean up old content, get clients thinking about governance and maintenance, and improve the clarity and purposefulness of the content they were producing. Yet I was still hitting walls: mobile sites where content was left to rot because it was managed separately from the desktop version; “related content” modules that were largely irrelevant; clients who couldn’t manage the content they had now but were certain they needed more, more, more.

Then, in the summer of 2011, I picked up Responsive Web Design by Ethan Marcotte. Knowing more about the Brazilian electroclash band CSS than cascading style sheets, I wasn’t certain what would be in it for me. But as I learned about his technique for adapting layouts for different devices, it hit me: We can have all the technical know-how in the world, but our content’s not ready for responsive design, nor for much of anything else the future might throw at it. Since then, I’ve been working on plenty of ideas for making content more future-friendly, flexible, and ready to travel, and this is the culmination of that work.

But this book is about more than creating a content strategy methodology for mobile. It’s also about embracing a new mind-set—one focused on what content means and how it works, rather than where it lives and how it looks on any specific page. It’s about breaking our reliance on old forms—fixed pages and documents—and replacing it with something that will hold up against a changing Web, and a changing world.

Most of all, this book is a start. I can’t promise it will answer every question about the future of content. But I hope it gets you asking them.