Laura Robertson

Do you love your CMS? Laura Robertson asked the audience at her Confab 2019 talk whether any of them loved their CMS. In a room of 750 people, only one hand went up. This sad state of affairs has prompted Laura to reflect deeply on content management systems.

Laura and I talked about:

her content strategy practice in London, working mostly with non-profit organizations

where there is room for improvement in content management systems:

most CMSs were designed to publish websites and web pages, whereas now we publish to many different platforms, voice, social media, email, and apps and other ways to deliver content

most CMSs have been developed tech-first, not content-first

which results in systems-led attitudes, seeing content as an add-on to a tech system

her experience with several CMSs, and her discovery of the same issues and related organizational cultural issues

how content strategy is largely about people

how traditional CMSs fail to consider the needs of authors, editors, and other back-end users

how there's no easy fix to this problem because it's not just a technical issue

how you can't always blame the tech, that technical people with content skills can overcome many of the issues in current CMSs

how the conversation around CMSs tends to focus on technical issues and how we as content people could spend more time at tech events and otherwise reaching out to our tech colleagues

how our use of tools like Google Docs might help start conversations around workflow improvements in CMSs

how closing the actual physical distance between content people and CMS administrators, actually working side-by-side, can improve our experience with CMSs

how to move content concerns up sooner in the sequence of building a website

the importance of including content strategy as early as possible in website and other projects

her favorite quote from Carrie Hane and Mike Atherton's Designing Connected Content: "You want to build your tool to fit the model, not model your content to fit the tool."

the importance of a content-first approach to content system design

how starting with a focus on content models, users needs, and internal users and starting with a blank canvas can improve content systems

Karen McGrane's famous Content in a Zombie Apocalypse talk and how we need to stop thinking in terms of blobs and more about chunks of content

how newer technical solutions are starting to embrace concepts like domain models and modular content

the emergence of tools like GatherContent and Contentful and how they help the authoring process

the enduring attitudinal issue of content being the poor relation of design and development

the importance of continuing to try to work our way into the conversation with the tech folks so that more hands

Laura's Bio

Laura is a content strategist at Contentious, the London-based agency she co-founded. She helps non-profits and campaigners with their content strategy, focusing on shifting to a more modular and user-centered approach (and eradicating double spaces along the way!).

She believes in putting content first and people and planet at the heart of everything. Laura speaks French and Spanish and has lived in Argentina, Colombia, France and Mexico.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

https://youtu.be/HA_bU6OxPYA

Transcript

Larry:

Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 45 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I'm really happy today to have with us Laura Robertson. Laura is a Content Strategist and Co-founder at Contentious, an Agency in London. And I met her at a conference a few weeks ago and we had...