Tabitha Akins's Capstone Blog

This blog collects my thoughts and musing on my journey to create a web presence for a small business using a holistic content strategy approach.

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Messaging

Now that I have a fairly decent grasp on who the audiences are for this project, today I began working on the messaging for the brand and the website.

Messaging Messaging is one of the most important aspects of any brand or website project. As Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach state in Content Strategy for the Web,

Messaging brings your core strategy to life. It helps you define what this specific web content needs to communicate in order to get you closer to your ultimate goal. It helps you prioritize content needs, keep content consistent, and align content owners on content requirements. 

A brand or website’s messages are what tie everything today. Those messages permeate throughout every piece of content that brand touches or website hosts. So understanding what the key messages are for this project is extremely important.

Card Sorting As with most areas of content strategy, each strategists has a slightly different way they recommend coming up with the key messages for a website or a messaging strategy.

To begin working on the messaging for this project, I went with Margot Bloomstein’s card sorting method that she details in Content Strategy at Work: Real-World Stories to Strengthen Every Interactive Project.

With this method, Bloomstein recommends that stakeholders sort through index cards that have possible adjectives to describe their brand or website on them. Stakeholders are to sort the cards into the following categories:

“Who we are: How do you think your brand is currently perceived?”

“Who we’d like to be: How would you like the brand to be perceived?”

“Who we’re not: Which terms don’t you want to associate with your brand?”

In the end, I found this method to be very effective. It was interesting to see how some of the words were instantly weeded out, but others I haggled over and contemplated for quite a while before putting them into a category. By the end of the exercise, I felt like I had a fairly decent grasp on the messaging for this project. Or at least a good start on the messaging.

UBBN Messaging The messaging below is still in a early stages and needs to be fleshed out more. At this time, the messaging is currently just adjectives describing the brand and the website. 

The following messages are considered to be key messages that should come through on every page of the website, without few exceptions:

Unique (This adjective is literally in the name of the business.)

Fun

Trendy

Friendly

Regional (Southern)

Other possible messages for the brand and website:

Customer-oriented

Enthusiastic

Casual

Over the next couple of days and into the weekend, I am hoping to fully flesh out the messaging for the website, since it and the target audiences will be major factors in my recommendations for what revisions and changes should be made moving forward.

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Target Audiences and Personas

Over the past few days I’ve been working through the target audiences for this project. What I thought was going to be a pretty simple and (fairly) easy process turned out to be a bit more difficult. Despite the difficulty, however, I feel like I’ve settled on pretty good understanding of who the targets audiences should be for the revised website.

Research Consulted To help me figure out how to define the audience for the website, I consulted several sources:

Communicating Design: Developing Web Site Documentation for Design and Planning by Dan M. Brown

Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee

Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach

Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook by Paula Ladenburg Land

Letting Go of the Words: Writing Web Content that Works by Janice (Ginny) Redish

Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper

Each of these works took a slightly different approach to defining the intended audience for web content. As such, I pieced together various parts from each.

Creating Personas One thing I was certain that I wanted to create were various personas of the target audience. Halvorson and Rach maintain that personas are not necessarily needed, and that “a bulleted list of user attributes can work just as well.” While that may be true, personas are used throughout the industry of content strategy and beyond, and as such, are something that I should probably have at least some experience in dealing with.

With that being said, creating the personas was actually the most difficult part of figuring out the target audience. The main reason for this difficulty is that I have very little information regarding the actual audience on the UBBN website and the business: a couple of Shopify reports, an interview with the business owner, and an interview with a friend of the business owner who has helped the owner at several events.

Every source listed above emphatically states that you should base target audiences and personas off of real data, and lists what seems like a never ending number of ways to find out information about the target audience. Most of which I don’t have access to (i.e. analytics software) or the time to implement (i.e. extensive customer interviews). So while creating the personas, I almost felt as if I were just making people up instead of representing the actual audience, even though I did have some data I was basing them off. In the end, however, I still feel that the personas I created represent the target audience for the website and the business.

UBBN Target Audiences The following are the target audiences for the UBBN website:

Customer

Potential (Primary)

First-Time

Returning (Secondary)

Women

Individual - Self (Primary)

Mom (Secondary)

Young Mom

Older Mom

Grandmother

Daughter

Friend

As you can see, there are two main types of audiences for the website: customer and women. Within each of these categories there are further types of audiences that have also been determined and designated as a primary or secondary audience.

Moving forward these audience types, along with the personas, will be a guidepost for creating the recommendation report and content strategy for the website and business.

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Notes from Today’s Project Housekeeping Activities

Finished off my first notebook and set up my second

Came up with a list of information I need to know/work out before moving forward with the recommendation report

Does the client want to use Unique Boutique by Nicole or UBBN as the general brand name?

How did she come up with her current logos? Does she have the original logos saved somewhere? Does she have other sizes of the logos? Is she open to changing the logo?

The client needs a set of print directions she can give to customers and put on her website. (Observation from 10/1 when I shadowed her at an event.)

Need to have the client flesh out her rewards program and what it entails.

Need to know the appropriate image size for a hero image carousel.

Defining the audience, brand messaging, and brand voice is crucial before making any recommendations. These were all gap areas found from the inventory/audits.

Plan for the Upcoming Week

Monday: Email client about relevant information needed. Fully define audience and possibly create personas.

Tuesday - Thursday: Transfer new research into research spreadsheet.

Friday/Saturday: Fully define brand messaging and voice attributes. Email client about audience and brand messaging/voice for input.

Sunday: Go through bookmarked sources. Take client feedback into account for next week’s activities.

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All content inventories and audits are finished!

Today I finished the last of the content inventories and audits, which included

Content inventory of my client’s website

Analysis of content inventory

Content audit of my client’s website

Multichannel audit of my client’s touchpoints (only some touchpoints, not all)

Competitor audit

Tomorrow I will begin working on analyzing the inventory and audit results, and begin putting them into an audit report. I also need to decide if I want to make one analysis report, instead of the two I had originally planned. It might be helpful just to put everything (inventory, audits, internal impact factors, external impact factors) all into one report. But that’s a decision for tomorrow.

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Content Inventory Complete!

Yesterday I (finally!) finished the content inventory of my client’s website.

I am still amazed at how long the inventory actually took. I expected it to take a week, maybe a little more given time constraints on my schedule, but it ended up actually taking three weeks to complete. The fact that the inventory took so long actually helped me to understand why all the books on content strategy explicitly state the importance of planning enough time for each section of a project. Underestimating how much time it will take to complete a section of a project can only hurt you in the long run.

One good thing that came out of the inventory taking so long, is that I really feel like I have an intimate understanding of my client’s website. I am hopeful that because I already have a pretty decent understanding of the site and it’s issues after spending so much time with the site over the past few weeks, that it will make the audit process move a little more quickly. Beginning that audit process and analyzing the content inventory spreadsheet will be my main priorities as I move into the month of November.

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Content Inventory

Over the past week or so, I have begun to work on the content inventory. And what an experience it has been so far. This project is the first time I have ever attempted an inventory for a more extensive website, and I fully understand why doing an inventory on an enterprise scale can take weeks. Just doing the inventory of my client’s website is taking a bit longer than I thought it was going to.

For this part of the project I chose to do two things: 

have an inventory tool crawl the site, and

conduct a manual inventory of the site.

Inventories For the website crawl, I used the CAT (Content Analysis Tool) recommended in Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook by Paula Ladenburg Land. As of this moment, the tool will be most useful for images of the current website, as one of the features of the tool is that it screenshots every page of a site it crawls. So, in the future when I need images of the current website, I won’t have to screenshot them myself.

For the manual inventory of the site, I consulted Content Strategy For the Web by Kristina Halvorson & Melissa Rach, Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide by Kevin P. Nichols, and The Web Content Strategist’s Bible by Richard Sheffield. After looking at each of their sections on inventories, I came up with the following main columns for my own content inventory spreadsheet:

ID #

Title (usually the title of the webpage)

Content Type (text, link, image, webpage, etc.)

Content Description

Content Owner or Author

Storage Location

Last Updated

Update Frequency (daily, monthly, as needed, rarely, never, unknown)

Metadata (yes, no, unknown)

Metadata Keywords

Notes

Although I am still inventorying the site, I have already learned some very valuable information regarding the current set up of the website.

There are no landing pages for six of the main product categories.

The content on product pages is inconsistent. For example, some pages have a (limited) size description, while others don’t have a size description at all.

There are multiple pages for the same product. For example, one dress has 10 different pages dedicated to it, which are split up by size and color. (At this time, I don’t know if this is an issue that will be able to be fixed, since I don’t currently know the reason for this set up.)

I currently do not know the last updated date or update frequency for any page of the site. For some of the pages, such as the home page, I have been entering how often I believe the page is updated, even though I don’t really know that information yet.

The hours of operation are buried in the “Location” page, which can only be accessed by scrolling to the footer of the website and clicking on the link underneath the “Quick Links” section.

Although the business does have a return policy, it will more than likely need to be rewritten and reformatted to make it easier to read and of more use to the intended audience.

Moving Forward While the inventory does seem to be taking a bit longer than I thought, it is already showing me valuable information and where I will need to focus my energies moving forward. My hope is to finish up the manual inventory this week and then move on to the auditing process at the end of October.

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Yesterday I had the opportunity to observe my client at one of her events and meet with her for the second time regarding this project. It was a truly enlightening day. Below are the main take aways from my time spent with her yesterday.

1. Desire, but not Execution Although my client has a desire to build a brand for her business, her execution of that desire is haphazard at best. She has content and customer touchpoints everywhere. At the event yesterday, I counted no less than six different business card designs. During the interview, she mentioned that she has taken out a print add, a radio add, and has partnered with the local high school to advertise. She has also begun using Snapchat, in addition to Instagram and Facebook. And, for the most part, none of these channels share the same tone, voice, or content. Really fleshing out what her brand is and getting all of her channels to present brand will be a concern moving forward. (Note: There may be some areas that are simply out of the scope of what I can achieve in this project. I will have a better understanding of what all I will be able to do for this project after the inventories, audits, and analysis phases.)

2. Importance of Events When I first started this project, I knew that my client went to things that she called “shows,” but I did not fully understand their importance to her business. Events are actually her business’s greatest source of capital. However, and something that I found really interesting, her website doesn’t have an events page. Nor does her Instagram feed promote the events. Moving forward, integrating these events into the overall strategy will be important.

3. Photography Achilles Heel After the meeting yesterday, I realized that photography may become a significant problem for this project. My client used to employ a professional photographer, who was responsible for all photographer on her website. However, my client no longer has a relationship with that photographer, and currently takes all pictures for the site herself. Trying to create best in practice photography will be a goal for this project, but in the end, it may not be achievable.

4. System Miscommunication An important concern at some point in this project will be to get all my clients systems to communicate with one another. For example, currently the system my client uses to count and organize her inventory is not synced with her website. Because of this situation, yesterday my client physically sold an item to a customer that she had already sold to another customer online. Trying to figure a solution to this problem will be very important.

5. “Canned” Content If there was one thing that became apparent yesterday, it was my client’s need for “canned” content: pre-written, automatic email responses; consistent labels; consistent responses to UGC; FAQs; policy details; directions to her store. Working on creating these pieces of content will more than likely turn out to be a major part of the content creation phase of this project.

6. Hidden Players The last take away from my time with my clients yesterday is that there are several other players involved with her content and its creation/publication process. Taking these players into account will be important moving forward

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Raw Observation Notes from 10/1/16

open market style event

very casual demeanor, but tries to interact with customers and anticipate their questions

business cards are several types of different designs

everything is handwritten (i.e. all signage, prices, etc.)

family oriented event

mostly lower income to middle class

people comment on how cute the clothes are

also comment on the price - too high

seem to try to use the events to drive people to the website and store

one time offered a discount in store if they bought something at an event

needs an events page on her site

pretty steady stream of customers

trying to give directions to the store to customers; does not have printed directions to give out

text and emails customers receipts

customer asked about returns if the item didn’t fit; rattled off policy to them; nothing in print

boutique blowout (major event for her); both in Alabama and Atlanta; boutiques get together and an create an event where they offer discounts on their items; also have a cash bar at this event so that people can drink and shop

only does certain events

need to know how these events affect the inventory for the store/website

stated that she keeps a record of what was sold at the event and then takes what they sold down from the site, so while at the show, the same inventory is still showing as available on the website

later on that day, someone bought an item that had already been ordered online - she forgot to “pull it” before the show

contest on instagram

talked about how her website wasn’t getting much traffic lately

does facebook sales before putting inventory up on her website; puts up clothes, customers leave their emails, she send them an invoice of their sale

have a stamp rewards program; customer asked if there was a way to do it online, and she stated that she had to physically punch the card

started writing down orders when her system died

need to know how many systems she uses

city doesn’t allow any signage advertising their store because it violates city code; they do have a banner in their store window

“wings it” when getting back to customers; doesn’t have any pre-written message (ex. email from customer about a broken necklace as we were leaving)

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Later today I have my second client meeting. This meeting will also double as an observation day, as I will be with my client at one of, what she calls, “shows.” These “shows” are various events around her state where you has a booth and sells her products. It will be interesting to see how she interacts with potential customers at one of these events. After this event, we will have our meeting. The agenda below is the current plan.

Meeting Goals

To make sure that I fully understand my client’s business goals and goals for the website.

To answer key questions regarding topics that will become important as I move forward with the project. (See below.)

Meeting Topics & Questions

For these topics and questions I consulted (1) Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose by Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee, (2) Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook by Paula Ladenburg Land, (3) Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide by Kevin P. Nichols, and (4) Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper. Some of these questions are those suggested by these sources.

Business Goals

What are your goals for your business in the next year? Five years? Ten years?

Content

What is your typical workflow for identifying a content need, getting it created, and published?

What are your painpoints and successes in publishing content?

How do you organize your content?

How do you name your content?

Do you use metadata?

Do you archive your content?

Do you rely on third parties for content?

How do you measure the success or failure of content?

Website

What do you like about your current website?

What are your problems/issues with your current website?

What would you like to change about your website?

Competitors

What specifically do you like about your competitor’s websites?

Social Media

What channels do you use?

How do you decide what to publish to each channel?

Do you crosslink between channels?

Legal

Are there any legal or regulatory requirements that dictate the need for particular types of content?

Are you required to archive content or keep it for a certain amount of time?

User/Audience

Who is your target audience?

What data do you gather about your users?

How do you handle user generated content?

I’m really looking forward to this meeting, as it will hopefully answer some very important questions for moving forward with this project.

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Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook - Paula Ladenburg Band

As was the case with Nichols’s book on Enterprise Content Strategy, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook by Paula Ladenburg Band is a short book that packs a huge punch.

In short, the book goes over what content inventories and audits are and how to go about completing them. This book will be a go-to resource when I begin Phase Two for a number of reasons.

Introduced me to an automated inventory program: the Content Analysis Tool (CAT). I had planned to do a manual inventory of my client’s website; however, after browsing through what the CAT can do, I believe I will let create and inventory for me, and then go from there. This tool could end up saving me hours of tedious spreadsheet work that could be better spent moving forward with the project.

Gave me an excellent primer on what I need to do and what information I need to know before starting the audit, including an excellent section of stakeholder interviews. (Pages 31-39)

Went over several types of audits, some of which I had not even thought of before.

Multichannel: As I talked about in my post on my first client meeting, taking into account the number of content channels my client uses will be essential to this project.

Personas & Customer Journey: Although creating personas and a detailed customer journey could end up being outside the scope of this project, this chapter gave me some great questions that I could take into account in other ways.

Content Quality

Content Effectiveness

Competitor Audit

Legal: Before reading this chapter, I had honestly not even thought about what legal issues or requirements might be important or relevant to my client’s business. After reading it, however, I realized that I need to fully understand how my client treats copyright, if she has a privacy policy & terms of use, and how she treats user-generated content. Those last two areas are particularly important, since my client collects data on her customers (i.e. addresses, credit card information, phone numbers, etc.) and uses social media outlets to promote her business.

Finally, as someone who is a perfectionist and who loves to do research, this book left me with a call-to-action that I don’t intend to forget:

But, to quote a well-known sporting goods company, at some point you need to just do it. Jump in, learn, refine your process. Do it again. Your circumstances dictate how you conduct your content analysis activities, so adapt and modify what you’ve learned here to your situation. Then share your experience with the community so that we can all continue to learn and develop our skills.

Keeping this call-to-action in mind and this book beside me, I’m looking forward to starting Phase Two of this project in the coming weeks.

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Websites for Audit

Today, my client emailed me a list of websites that she keeps tabs on and would like to model herself after:

Hope’s

Pink Lily Boutique

Pink Coconut Boutique

Closet Candy Boutique

One Faith Boutique

From my brief look at them, with the exception of the last website, they all seem to have a very similar set up and navigation. They all also seem to deploy the same marketing techniques (pop up boxes, links to rewards club, etc.). These are just my first observations, but these websites seem like they will be a great start for the external audit(s). I also think these sites will give me some insight into what types of content my client values and how she wants to see her website move forward in the future.

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Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy - Ann Rockley & Charles Cooper

I’ve had Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy by Ann Rockley and Charles Cooper on my Capstone source list for quite some time. After reading Enterprise Content Strategy by Kevin P. Nichols, however, I knew I had to read it. I literally lost count at the number of times Nichols references this book in his.

I’m a little over halfway through, and so far, it’s been a very interesting read that could have somewhat of an impact on this project moving forward. At least on some parts of the project.

Content Modeling & Reuse

As the title suggests, this book is all about how to strategize for and manage content at an enterprise level. Unlike the other seven content strategy related books that I have read, however, Rockely and Cooper take a slightly different approach. Most of the other books focus on the stages of strategizing for content (Plan, Assess, Define/Design, Build, Publish, Govern) and the types of activities and deliverables that are expected in each phase.

Instead of focusing on those phases, Rockley and Cooper focus more on the purpose of content, and how to make it has adaptive and reusable as possible. For me, the main takeaway from this book can be summed up in this quote:

Content strategists cannot, and we repeat, cannot, continue to handcraft content for a particular output. If you want your content to be adaptive, you can’t think about how it will look and then tweak and tune the content to get that perfect fit. You can’t design your content strategy around a particular page or layout. You have to create a content strategy that’s only about the content and its purpose, scope, use, and reuse. You need to know what content is required, by whom, when, in what circumstance, and in conjunction with what other content or interactivity (136).

As this quote showcases, Rockley and Cooper’s main argument is that content must be created and crafted outside of the confines of design, with design here meaning website page layout, font size, colors used, etc. In fact, in my view, Rockley and Cooper are pretty much advocating for a template style of writing and content creation, which is emphasized in their chapter “Content Modeling: Adaptive Content Design.” Under this content modeling style, creating content is basically about filling out the right areas on a form.

Moving Forward

For me, this is a new way of thinking about content and strategizing for it, as I usually have content and design wrapped up together in my head. While the idea of content modeling and reuse is very interesting (and at the enterprise level one that is essential), I’m not sure how much it will help for this project. As of right now, the main area where I can see it helping is on product pages. Product page areas of the website would greatly benefit from a template style of writing. I’m not sure about other areas, however. 

With all of that being said, whether I end up using content modeling extensively or just for a few areas, Rockley and Cooper have definitely given me a lot to think about moving forward.

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Today I have been reading about branding and a brand’s voice & tone. The sources (1/2/3/4/5/6/7/8) have given me a lot to think about and questions to answer.

Currently my client uses both Unique Boutique by Nicole and UBBN as names for her business. Should part of the branding strategy be that she only uses one name or both, but only in certain situations?

My client has a logo that she uses on her website. How did she come up with this logo? Does she only have this logo in one size? Does she wish to change the logo or its colors?

What type of voice and tone is my client already using?

I already know my client has several digital channels for her content, but does she have any print channels? Shipping labels, business cards, etc.?

When the project reaches the build phase, will we take her current site down during that time? What time frame will be best for my client during this phase?

These questions will definitely give me a place to start when it comes to branding, which has really shown itself to be something I should take into consideration moving forward.

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Yesterday I had my first client meeting with Brittany, and I think it went really well. The meeting pretty much followed the agenda that I set out the day before, and unearthed some interesting aspects of the business and my client.

Gut over Strategy For starters, while Brittany has done a little bit of research on how to present her content (i.e. looking at other businesses she views as competitors and seeing how they do things), most of her decisions come from her “gut.” She does what she thinks will help her business and increase her sales, but she doesn’t have any set out strategy or plan for presenting content. For example, at one point she talked about how she requires two of her employees to make 10 Instagram posts during their shifts in the hopes that it would drive up sales; however, she had no source that she pulled this idea from or reason why she settled on 10 as the number of posts they needed to make. When we have a more in-depth meeting at the beginning of next month, I will probe this area of her business more to get a much better understanding of how she makes her content decisions.

Content Channels Galore Another interesting aspect of her business, and one that I had suspected when I first took on the project, is that she has several content channels, but only uses a handful of them. Currently, her business has

the main website

a Facebook page

an Instagram

a mass text message system

a Twitter

a Pinterest

a Snapchat

and a mass email system.

However, she only uses the first four channels. I’m really glad that I found this out yesterday, instead of much further down the road, because I will need to slightly tweak the audit section of the project to account for these channels and their content.

Knowing that she currently has all of these content channels also validates my plan to make this project as holistic as possible. Making a strategy just for her website would obviously be detrimental to the overall project, as she would still be using those other channels as well.

Moving Forward Going forward with the project, I must say that after the client meeting, I am even more excited to work on this project. The meeting gave me several new and interesting paths to explore, and a much better sense of where I need to go with the overall project. I’m really looking forward to continuing to find more research in Phase One and then moving into the audit stage in Phase Two. I really think this project is going to turn out to be great.

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Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide - Kevin P. Nichols

Enterprise Content Strategy: A Project Guide by Kevin P. Nichols is a short book, but boy does it pack a punch. This book is not even 150 pages, but it gave me an excellent primer on what it takes to institute a content strategy at an enterprise level.

While my capstone doesn’t require me to work at an enterprise level, I still plan to model the phases of this project and its deliverables after those used at the enterprise level, which is why I chose to read it in the first place.

Although the book will be an excellent resource throughout the project, for the moment, Nichols’s emphasis on governance and his chapter on the assess phase of the project will be the most helpful.

Governance One of the more interesting aspects of this book is that Nichols puts governance at the center of a content strategy. Usually governance concerns seem to be left until the very end of a content strategy or project; however, Nichols believes that “governance drives your content strategy” (123) and that it should be one of your earliest concerns in any project. I’ve always believed that governance was of utmost importance to a project, so it was nice to read that a content strategy professional believes so as well. Moving forward with this project, I will definitely be placing governance concerns at the forefront.

Assess Phase Although I will not formally start this phase of my capstone until October, Nichols’s chapter on the assess phase will prove itself to be helpful starting later today. In this chapter, Nichols spends over 10 pages discussing stakeholder interviews, and gives an extensive list of questions that should be considered when you begin to assess the state of your content. Many of the questions Nichols’s puts forth in this section I had never even thought about asking, but after reading them, I see how getting the answers to them are so important to starting off any content strategy project. As I conduct my first client meeting later today, and conduct others in the future, I will be drawing on this section heavily.

Overall, I found this book to be very enlightening and will more than likely draw on it frequently as I complete my capstone.

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Tomorrow I have my first client meeting, and today I have been going over the plan for it. 

Key Questions before the meeting

What information does my client need from me at this stage?

What information do I need from my client at this stage?

Key Questions Answers

My client needs to be as fully informed as possible about the project plan, parts, and goals.

I need to know my client’s business goals/goals for the project, her login information (so I can begin looking at the backend of her website/digital spaces), who all has a hand in putting her content out to the world, and how we are going to communicate about the project in the future.

From these questions and answers, I have come up with the following meeting goals and agenda.

Meeting Goal #1: To fully inform my client about the project, its parts & plan, and answer any of her initial questions.

Meeting Goal #2: To get initial information from my client about her business, her website/digital spaces, and her wants, needs, and goals for the project?

Meeting Agenda

Explain the purpose of the meeting and its goals.

Review the project plan and parts, and explain the project’s current goals and purpose.

Answer any questions my client may have at this point in the meeting.

Discuss

My client’s business history

My client’s business goals

My client’s website goals

Who has access/helps produce to my client’s content

How we will communicate in the future about the project

Answer any questions my client may have at this point in the meeting.

Make a plan for our next meeting.

I am really hopeful that this meeting will be a great starting point for future meetings and will insure that my client and I are on the same page with the overall project.

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Welcome!

My name is Tabitha, and this blog is part of my Capstone for my graduate program. For this project, I will be revising a client’s business content and website using a holistic content strategy approach in order to help my client better meet the needs of her customers and business.

Over the course of the next nine months I will be using this blog as an outlet for my thoughts on the project, how I feel about the project process, and as a collection place for research. Given this set up for the blog, posts will more than likely range from simple notes to a more traditional journal style.

I am a firm believer in using less formal writing spaces, such as blogs, as a way to work through a project, a difficult issue facing the world, or simply to get to know yourself better. By using this space to work through my thoughts over the course of the project, I hope to make the final paper deliverable a stronger representation of the process I went through to complete the Capstone, as well as the overall project itself.

I am also hoping that using this space will help me remember details of the project better. When you’re writing a paper in March/April 2017, it’s a little hard to remember exactly what you were doing, the details of the section you were working on, and how you were feeling about the project in September 2016. By having a collection of posts detailing my experience, I will be better able to remember those details and weave them into my final paper.

I’m really looking forward to the journey this project will take me on, and hope that it will end with a final result that will not only help my client, but her customers as well.