I’ve long thought it important for certain businesses to have blogs. Particularly if a business relies on the expertise of its staff, a blog can really help that business build a reputation for being experts in that particular field.
What we’ve done in Soupgiant, however, is take the blog portion of our website and move it over here to Big Red Tin. The two sites still link to each other. There’s no doubt that the people in charge over here are also in charge over there. It’s one and the same.
We decided to separate the two because we didn’t want to disrupt any one audience.
Soupgiant.com is our sales website. It’s where we’ll put all our information about the products and services we offer. Customers will be able to see the work that we’ve done for other clients and can see if what we can do for them is actually what they want.
Big Red Tin, on the other hand, is just a blog. It gives us a chance to document every single part of our business, from bits of code to design concepts and also choices we make in running our business in the day to day.
Basically we hope that this will become a repository of information that can help people who encounter the same issues we have.
This is the first lesson of Content Strategy and it’s something we are taught all through school but still often manage to forget: Know your audience.
Websites have the added benefit of allowing our audiences to know us. So, in one sense we can work out the audience for a website by asking: What do we want our audience to know about us?
With Big Red Tin we’ve already answered that question earlier in this post: We want to share what we learn from the issues we encounter.
To do that, we’ve split this blog into four categories that we think detail all aspects of our business:
- Behind the Websites details the work we do in coding websites and dealing with content management system (CMS).
- Business is about business decisions we’ve made or the general lessons we learn in running a business, either based on our own experiences or our observations of others.
- Content Strategy discusses the intricacies in honing the content of websites to achieve the greatest value from them. It might be about navigation or website accessibility or the general layout of information on the screen, but it also might be about words and how to use them.
- Design will bring together aspects of graphic design that we deal with. Buttons, images, colours, styles, legibility – basically everything that brings that all important first opinion will be dealt with under the “Design” banner.
There might be people who are interested in all four of these categories but we hope splitting them out makes it easier for those only interested in one or two.
For more specific areas of discussion we have tags. There are many of these and you’ll see them at the bottom of each post. So, if you’re on a post about CSS3 and you want to know more, you can see all our posts about CSS3.
Big Red Tin is the result of a long process of planning, which is the only way to do content strategy correctly. We hope you enjoy what we do here and encourage you to share your experiences in the comments.
