Creating Content without Strategy is Just Noise

Content doesn’t just get created in a vacuum. For it to be useful and a helper/catalyst for change, it needs underlying vision, structure and strategy. In other words, we need to be careful about throwing dozens of different, disparate ideas at the web (no matter how interesting they are by themselves), expecting them to be successful. 

Everything we do on the web is a part of a whole, and if the whole doesn’t sing in harmony, that dissonance will confuse and turn off people. 

If we were only presenting a small amount of content/information, we could just put it out there and let people make sense of it. But we’re not doing that anymore. We’re pushing an increasingly large amount of content out into the world for consumption/use, built on a growing existing pile of discoverable content. 

We have to have some guardrails for it so it doesn’t get out of hand. We don’t want diminishing returns on new content because it’s too difficult to find or understand or sort through, or because there are literally too many choices being presented to people. Decision fatigue is real talk when it comes to the web. 

We can be complex (we are) but we want to be clear in that complexity, and that will require design decisions that naturally push certain content types/sections off center stage for specific, strategic reasons.