Drupal expert Gregory Heller was recently featured on the Lullabot podcast Drupal Voices on the subject of content strategy. Mr. Heller is from CivicActions, an excellent Drupal firm dedicated to social causes. [They also happen to have shared their standard consulting contract under a CreativeCommons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which we've adopted in our practice, as well. In short, they are awesome.]
What he shares so eloquently is what I've been telling startups for some time now: start with your content. Too many times I see large documents full of features -- some vetted by customers, some not -- that "will differentiate the site." Those features are usually all great and, well, some will differentiate for a time until somebody else thinks it's an awesome idea and mimics. (Copying not required -- innovation is a bigger threat to differentiating features. I digress...) But really, what is shockingly common when one of these Frankenlists is there at the start of an engagement is how little attention has been paid to the content.
So you have a blog. Who's going to write that blog? Moderate comments? Comment on other blogs in the wild? Forums. Who's the community manager keeping things civil and moving (good but) dead threads forward? And how about the user-generated content police? Riiiight… what exactly is the staffing plan for supporting that while you enforce your editorial workflow for staff-generated content? That's already a lot of stuff, and doesn't get into general feature support, let alone IE6 users.
Mr. Heller's point is just this: Don't invest so heavily in technology that you can't afford to support what you've created. I'm not saying "slash your development budget!" to startups. That would be, well, insane of me. Rather, I encourage startups to be strategic in the features they implement and always have a plan for how they're going to support the content that lies at the core of a site.
Of course, some web properties view themselves as "tools" rather than content sites. The premise is the same: you will have content, and you'd better have a plan for it *first*. And here, the temptation to glom on features is even greater; having a feature strategy becomes as important and follows the same rubric.
The podcast is an excellent listen, and is complimented by this April 8, 2010 Ignite talk of his at #10NTC Ignite Session in Atlanta, GA, You Don't Need A Website, You Need A Web Strategy. Ain't that the truth.
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