A content management system needn’t refer to a specific piece of software. All content management requires a system, whether this is online or offline. How is content generated? How is it stored? Who needs to sign off content before it is adopted or published? These are all questions that need answering, even before we begin to ask what is the content ‘about’. A good content manager will understand where content is coming from, before they can start to begin to think about where and how it should be processed before reaching an audience.

Just as the content management systems that are introduced to an organisation need to complement the way the organisation operates, they also need to appeal to the audience. Can you organise content by the tasks users will be seeking to complete? How can both internal and external needs be met? Standards and classification systems within the organisation and taxonomies used within your sector can help to define overarching categorise that can be used to organise and manage content. The Dublin Core and the Integrated Public Sector Vocabulary (IPSV) are useful starting points when thinking about metadata structures. But there are also behavioral categories that can be introduced to organise content.

Information architecture is an organic structure that needs to grow and evolve as content is added to a system. Combining controlled and uncontrolled vocabularies, and using metadata to complement content classification adds adaptability. Folksonomies, as uncontrolled vocabularies, allow users to tag and contribute to the classification of their own content. This enables collaboration and intuitive systems of tagging and relating content to emerge, which in turn can inform refinement and development of the controlled system of classification.

User interface and the visual representation of the information architecture must be consistent. This helps users to understand the underlying structures behind a website or catalogue of content, and construct their own mental model of the site and its sections.

Content and communications are complicated. While CMS has lowered the technical barriers that stopped clients taking control of their sites in the past, it doesn’t help with some of the other elements of expertise that are needed to make a web proposition work. Writing is a skill. Writing for the web is a technical skill. Managing a site using a CMS combines these skills with others. I’m hoping to add more content to the site soon that discusses the challenges of using resources effectively to deliver content to audiences. This should cover the skills of writing for the web as well as the technologies that enable it.

That’s a bit of a jargon-laden way of saying that a good project should take what the client wants and design the solution that will be most successful by naturally appealing to the audience.

My hobby is researching, writing about and inventing magic tricks. Some people think magic is about misdirection – but, just like great design and content it is really about managing attention, directing it away from the action at times, but always having it under control.

Magic is about making the possible seem impossible, while design is about creating a similar ‘intuitive inevitability’. Both design and magic ask the creator to shape a product that will complement the needs of the audience, while at the same time leading inevitably to a desired outcome. Audiences shouldn’t feel bullied or manipulated, they should feel as though the experience just ‘flowed’. The audience should feel in control, but drawn to where you want them to go.

My experience has taught me that people tend to react in set patterns – and this is great news for both content design and magic. Using experience-based techniques to give you a head start when trying to design and influence human behaviour increases both success and efficiency. There’s no substitute for experience and by bringing creativity and imagination to projects allows you to build on top of these patterns to reach solutions efficiently, while still achieving originality and freshness that can delight and surprise users and audiences alike.

I’ll soon be blogging about how heuristics can inform the design process, and about how by following general principles clever designers and content managers can construct optimal experiences.

Question: You can’t just use Moodle out of the box – the basic Moodle install just isn’t that sophisticated

Answer: Have a look at the feature list, all of which comes as standard with every Moodle download. Additional themes, blocks and activities are easy to integrate and the vast majority are free, open source code too. In fact, one of your problems will be to determine which combination of sophisticated features are best going to meet your needs right out of the box.

Source: Moodle’s FAQs

Moodle does have lots of functionality, but finding the right combination and configuration for you takes time, effort and money. The UK’s Open University is well on the way to creating the world’s largest Moodle installation in a £5 Million project. It is expected to host nearly 200,000 students – much of the functionality and workflow is built on top of the Moodle core. Any LMS, even an open source solution, will cost money to get right.

When Becta examined the Total Cost of Ownership of open-source software on desktops in UK schools, they found significant savings compared to commercial alternatives. Open source is a great way to go, especially to reduce costs, but just as when adopting any new technology, you need to analyse your needs and match them to what Moodle has to offer. The Becta study only considered desktop applications. When you’re thinking about web applications, like Moodle, you need to factor in the cost of configuration, customisation and up-keep.

Moodle was not designed as a corporate solution. Moodle both looks and feels like a school experience – this is what it was designed for. And despite the original vision for Moodle, it doesn’t offer social learning experiences in the way most users would expect them to shape up.

Moodle collects content into courses. There are currently two ways of organising courses, but both restrict and collect content (by either weeks/terms or by subject). You could say that Moodle is based on a transactional model of learning. You spend a while learning about a specific topic and then prove you’ve acquired knowledge, usually through a quiz. It’s difficult to aggregate content to give users friendly views of the most recent activity, or activity across courses. Some work has been done to make this easier – for example Sussex University have a nice module – but these are working against the Moodle core experience, rather than with it.

It’s definitely not easy to find others’ spaces within Moodle – so it’s not ideal for peer support. Moodle is best suited to where a tutor is interacting with individuals in a class or cohort, not the type of asynchronous learning that commercial organisations often need to support. Moodle is really a course delivery system, not necessarily a career and development platform.

Web technologies and the way people use and interact with tools on the web has changed dramatically – from email to instant messaging to ‘conversations’ like those taking place on Facebook walls, genuine and rich social interactions are now possible online. People expect experiences where they feel naturally constrained, but in control. E-learning should now be about interactions, rather than transactions – it’s no longer enough to ask a learner a question and expect an answer, learners should be able to ask questions and get answers too.

Too many learning management systems lay the emphasis on the management, rather than the learning. They make life easy for the tutor, simplifying scheduling, tracking, organising and assessing learning. But they often do this at the expense of the learner experience. This way of organising a platform can actually place pressure on tutors. They become the learning manager, pushing the learning out to the learner and monitoring it. Imagine creating a situation where a ‘learning architect’ can add resources to a hub and allow learners some freedom to explore and learn together. This would create a demand-led dynamic, where both learners and tutors feel that the platform empowers them to increase the learning possible.

Building a social component into the learning platform at the specification stage will help to ensure that communities of interest (specific groups of people that it will benefit the business to bring together) can form. These groups can share common learning objectives and will feel encouraged to create and share content. In the real world, learning experiences happen and are then often shared through interactions, between peers and with tutors/mentors. A similar model, enabled through technology would enable communities that inspire greater independence and self-governance in learners. It will encourage user-generated content and personalisation. And it could do this within the structured ‘architecture’ of the system, ensuring that assessment and tutor support is still simple and straightforward.

Characters

People are complicated.

To bring a character to life a writer needs to think carefully and in detail about the sort of person the character is. This includes big picture stuff, like overall mission and objective, but also the little stuff, like what’s in their pockets?

To make it easier to create characters with broad appeal you can decide if the character fits into an archetype. In the hero just good, or is it more complicated than that? Is he an anti-here? Is he reluctant or a born leader? Is he the ‘chosen one’, and did he find this out himself or does he have a mentor.

We can split characters up into archetypes. Basing characters on a variety of archetypes ensures that stories we create have a good mix of different sorts of people – what kind of people make up the universe?

• Hero, anti-hero, lovable rogue, mastermind, level headed, headstrong, charismatic, reluctant leader, the apprentice, the cynic, jaded washout, acolyte, follower, analyst, villain, adaptive villain, arch enemy, complete monster, corrupt corporate executive, obstructive bureaucrat, innocent bystander.

The audience will relate to different character types, so by thinking about and identifying what type of people your characters are, you can ensure that their actions remain consistent and more people have the chance of connecting with the story.

Stories

Stories are complicated. They can be told as unconnected episodes that feature the same characters or as serialised episodes that are both self-contained and satisfying in themselves, but also part of a larger narrative arc.

From Charles Dickens to Lost, people have enjoyed story arcs. The interconnected episodes can be enjoyed alone, but there is a sense that there is more going on, which encourages people to watch more closely, come back for more and stick with it until the big reveal.

Search engines judge each link to a page from another page or site as a vote for the page. Search engines are really just big popularity contests – the more links you get the better.

• It is not just the number of links that are important, but also the quality.
• Quality is determined by context, relevance, and popularity of the linking page, as well as the link text.
• Not all links are treated equally. One link from an ‘authority’ website may be more valuable than 100 links from non-contextual websites.

Continue to encourage partners to link to your website.

Redirects

It’s important that if, in the future, a site is moved to another server or domain, that this is done using the correct type of redirect. While search engines do value stability, it may be that you are able to achieve better search engine results and increased direct traffic by moving the site to another domain.

If the site is moved to another domain, then using a ‘301 redirect’ will ensure that search engines know that the site has moved and are able to update their indexes accordingly.

Direct traffic – advertise and publicise

Advertising a website or campaign will help to increase the number of searches and click-throughs to the site, as more people use search engines to reach the site. This increases the value attached to the site and therefore increases your ranking.

Encouraging discussion of the site on social media sites like Twitter and social bookmarking services will also help to increase inbound links and, in turn, your ranking.

Analysis

Understanding how people are finding your site and then optimising to complement this search activity is the most efficient way of optimising for search engines. Analytics will show you the terms that people are currently using, but will also reveal underperforming keyphrases – terms which you think are important but which are missing from your current incoming traffic sources.

Analytics will give you a steer as to how well you are performing and where further investment of time or a paid for campaign might be necessary.

Search engines such as Google attribute more relevance when there is an exact phrase match on a web page (a phrase that matches the user’s search term), rather than just single words. It’s therefore more effective to consider and optimise occurrences of phrases rather than single words.

When you’re writing and optimising content on the web you should try to focus your attention on a manageable list of key themes, and select phrases and word combinations to repeat. Search engines assess occurrences of both keywords and synonyms on the page, so you can still keep your copy sounding fresh and engaging for users, while optimising it for your key phrases and concepts.

Select a manageable number of key concepts, order these into lists of associated words and phrases and ensure that you have site sections, page titles and content which feature each of these keyphrases.

When you are creating content there are three techniques and factors to consider.

Keyphrase prominence – stand out from the crowd

Search engine optimisation is a competition between you and the other websites that deal with similar themes and issues. When carrying out SEO you need to make it clear that you have more valuable content than other competing sites. You therefore need to show that your site’s priority is the same as your users, or in other words, the words that they are searching for are some of the most important on your site.

All search engines attempt to determine the most important words on a page, in a tag, or in a link. They have a number of ways of determining importance, but one of the main ones is prominence, the closer a word is to the front of the analysed text area, the more relevant or important it is.

Prominence implies that a word used at the beginning of a link or piece of text is more important than the rest. The words that follow are scored lower and lower by the algorithm until (in a very long text section) their value tends toward zero. Search engines evaluate each important page area or inbound link separately. Therefore your title tag, meta-description tag, keyword/keyphrase tags, heading tags, alt text tags, and page text all produce their own prominence pictures that, together, tell the search engine about your page.

An example of this in action is the title of this section. Compare the section titles:

• Keyphrases, not keywords
• Not keywords, keyphrases

By placing the term I want to optimise for at the start of the sentence I’ve increased its visibility and prominence to search engines.

Keyphrase proximity – build phrases

Just like ants, keywords work better as a team. Always try to keep your keywords and phrases together and where this isn’t possible keep them as close together as possible.

Search engines follow ruthless logic – if you manage to match your users’ search term exactly, rather than just one or two words, you are much more likely to increase your traffic from search engines. You can use Google Analytics to learn the search terms that site visitors are using to reach your site, and then add to or refine your SEO activities to improve your performance.

Keyphrase density – don’t dilute

Keyphrase density is used by search engines as a way of determining whether a web page is relevant for a specific keyword or phrase and is calculated using the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears on a web page compared to the total number of words on the page.

SEO experts consider the optimum keyword density to be 1 to 3%. Using a keyword more than that could be considered search spam. You should therefore keep your keyphrases in mind when you are writing content – but don’t overuse them.

On-page SEO

On-page SEO does exactly what it says on the tin. It focuses on the elements that make up your web pages; page titles, headings, content, and URLs all contribute to  your search engine ranking. Making changes, where necessary, is one of the most regularly reliable ways to improve search engine rankings.

Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO includes all the things you do to promote your website outside of the design. Getting more inbound links to your site, making sure that you’re listed in directories and search engines, and creating XML sitemaps or robot.txt are all parts of off-page SEO.

Both on-page and off-page SEO are aimed at improving your placing in natural search results. But as well as natural search results, search engines also provide and promote sponsored links.

Paid for SEO

You can create a highly-relevant text advert for each keyphrase you include in a paid for campaign. These adverts are then displayed when a user searches for that keyphrase. Paid for adverts are displayed in the ‘Sponsored links’ areas of search engine results pages (SERPs). One of the current most popular paid for services is Google Adwords (http://adwords.google.com)

Paid for adverts are only displayed when the specific keyword phrase is searched for, so they are highly targeted.

A lot of paid for services auction keyphrases, based on their popularity or competitiveness. The prominence of your advert is dependent on the price you bid for each clickthrough, with the highest bidder placed top (except in Google, where clickthrough rate is also taken into account).

You may want to consider a paid for campaign for highly competitive keyphrases, although you may feel that you can achieve your ambitions by refining your approach to SEO and relying on organic results.

Best practice

By understanding what you are offering to users on the web you can better describe it in the copy on the pages and the metadata that search engines use to understand your website, and in some cases, explain it to web users. Search engines are designed to get users to the pages that will be most helpful to them. The best way of ensuring a high ranking is therefore being useful, and making this ‘usefulness’ self-evident to search engines as well as your users.

High quality, relevant content and a site that is designed with both users and search engine accessibility in mind is the best way to prove to search engines that you are a valuable resource that they should be signposting users towards.

On-page SEO

On-page search engine optimisation should never be at the expense of the user experience – it should complement it.

Think of on-page SEO as labelling, refining and polishing content. You should be able to optimise your content without human readers being able to notice. One of the main things to consider is how you use keyphrases which describe and represent the main purpose and ‘offer’ of your site. More information on keyphrases is given in another post on this site.

In addition to the content that users see, there is a wealth of information and data that is visible to search engines to make it easier for them to understand what your site is about. This metadata (data about data) gives search engines the clearest indication of what your site is about, why users would want to visit it and for which search terms it should offer your site as a recommendation.

The golden rule of on-page SEO is prioritise the user experience, but always consider the effect that content choices will have on your visibility to search engines.

Conversion efficiency

Increasing your visibility in search engines will help to ensure that more people can find and visit your site. But once you’ve got them you want to make sure that you keep them, or at least get them to do what you want quickly. Make sure that your main call(s) to action is prominent on the page users will arrive at.

Meta description

A page’s meta description gives search engines a summary of what the page is about. This can be a sentence or two which summarises the content of the page, and is often used as the snippet given on search engine results pages. Try to write a description that will both inform and interest users – and is unique. Also try to feature keyphrases wherever possible.

Avoid:

• Writing a description that has no relation to the content on the page
• Using generic descriptions
• Filling the description only with keyphrases
• Copying and pasting all the content of the page into the description.

Use unique descriptions for each page – Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google. This also helps get users to the most relevant page in instances where a search brings up multiple pages on your domain.

Search engine indexing limit = 155 characters.

Meta keywords/keyphrases

You can also associate keyphrases to a page or post. This will also help to increase the site’s perceived relevance for specific phrases. Descriptions and keyphrases can be added at the same time as creating new content, or refined over time.

Alt_tags

Alt_tags offer alternative text for images and are used by both screen reader users and search engines. Search engines use all the metadata attached to a site to understand what the site is about and what it has to offer web users. Ensuring that all your images have alt_tags that are accurate, but which also feature your keyphrases where appropriate will help to improve search engine ranking.

Try to include keyphrases in alt_tags.

Internal links

Links on your site should be descriptive. For accessibility reasons you should not use text like ‘Click here’ or ‘Read more’ when giving users a link. But links are another opportunity to show search engines what your site is about. Ensuring that your link text is descriptive and features your keyphrases will help with your SEO activities.

Try to include keyphrases in link text.

Headers and titles

Search engines put more weight on the words that appear first on pages. If your key words and phrases are near the start of the page title you are more likely to rank well. This technique also helps users. People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keyphrases are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.

Try to create titles which:

• Contain important keyphrase combinations or phrases
• Create an engaging and compelling description of what the article is about, which differentiates it from other pages on your site
• Is short and to the point

Search engine indexing limit = 70 characters.

Try to make titles and headers enticing and feature keyphrases where possible.

Content isn’t bound to a single platform these days. Good brands are really content producers – they tell stories about themselves so that audiencescan buy into their values and get a better understanding of why they should connect with them. And audiences connect with content online, sometimes via TV, through their radio and on their mobile devices. Audiences can interact with brands wherever they are, so navigation needs to be designed for content, for your audience and for the devices they use.

Creating information architecture and the interfaces which expose it is always about negotiating the needs and priorities of the organisation that owns the content and the audience that own their individual experiences as they access it.

Technology has changed the way content is shared with audiences. TVs are about to get a lot more interactive. If you’ve ever tried to use a remote control to find a YouTube video on a TV, or tried to search content on a games console, it’s clear there are many challenges and lessons to learn to serve content efficiently in a converging media world. EPGs don’t afford very rich experiences, and aren’t great at surprising you with the serendipitous. Mobile devices offer smaller screen sizes and an emerging range of gestures and interactions for the user to control and construct their experience. All users have limited time, patience, buttons or gestures when they’re finding, exploring and consuming content. Navigation always needs to work, and it needs to work hard so that the user doesn’t have to.

Navigating content should feel intuitive and rewarding – the longer it goes on, the easier and more valuable it should become. I like navigation that makes a story of your visit to the website or sites I help to create. These stories aren’t just about the content, they’re also about the links.

I like to think of navigation as the options at the bottom of the pages of a ‘choose your own adventure’ story – the story might be different every time, but the experience will always be coherent and compelling.