Content Strategy

Develop content strategies for HealthCentral.com and TheBody.com.
I worked on this project as an Experience Designer at ExpandTheRoom.

The Project

The Challenges

  • Both of these sites were what I would consider XXL (20,000+ pages). Given the timeline and resources allocated to the project, I knew we would not be able to actually evaluate all of the individual pages of content, so we needed to identify a meaningful representative sample.

  • We knew going into this that a lot of out-of-date content existed on both of these websites.

  • There were limited people resources on the client side, which was important to keep in mind when we came up with our recommendations—because what good are recommendations that you don’t have the resources to execute on?

  • Historical analytics were unreliable due to past poor implementation, which led to us making some educated guesses based on limited data and assumptions that would need to be tracked and measured in the future in order to verify legitimacy.

My Role

On this project, my role was to help both the HealthCentral and TheBody teams to strategically figure out what direction to take their content in, identify what content was safe to get rid of, and determine what content made sense to keep. I was responsible for helping these two teams develop and document their strategic content vision and the practical tactics to make that vision a reality.

Key activities:

  1. Stakeholder interviews

  2. End user surveys

  3. Content inventory

  4. Content audit

  5. Gap Analysis

  6. Content Analysis, Strategy, & Recommendations

Deliverables

Content Audit
Gap Analysis
HealthCentral Content Strategy
TheBody Content Strategy

Both the HealthCentral and TheBody teams were excited about the work we did and expressed that they had learned new insights thanks to our analysis. HealthCentral.com has re-launched with their new website design, but has yet to implement all of the content changes. TheBody.com has not yet re-launched. My favorite outcome on this project was seeing the editors we worked with have lightbulbs go off and achieve clarity using the frameworks we were able to bring to the table. It still remains to be seen if in the long-run, by keeping the strategic vision top of mind and making decisions accordingly will in turn help them achieve better business outcomes, but that is my hope.

Outcomes