This post offers a practical guide to creating a content plan for your website. By following this guide you will first identify the following three components of your content plan:
- Target audience groups
- Website objectives
- Visitor actions
With that in place, you will then be able to draft the sitemap structure for the key pages on your website with a focus on how your audience will use your website to help you meet your objectives by taking certain actions.
To make it easier for you to create your own content plan we have included a downloadable template you can use. Just follow the guidance in this post and fill in the sections in the template as you go.
For illustration purposes we will provide examples throughout the post. These will focus on the needs of a typical membership organisation but the principles apply to many charities and other similar organisations.
We've created a downloadable template to accompany this guide.
Define your target audience groups
It’s important to define your target audience groups in order to ensure that you communicate effectively to the right people through your website. There will be lots of different types of visitors to your site but you should identify the most important audiences and optimise the user experience for them.
Most membership organisations are primarily interested in two key audience groups.
There may also be other audience groups that come into contact with your website that you want to include in your content plan.
Examples of other audience groups include the following.
Another stakeholder group that is worth listing is internal admin staff. Part of the purpose of any good membership website will be to make life easy for staff who must administer membership queries and communicate with members.
Define your website objectives
Where possible you should define specific and measurable objectives that will help you assess your website’s performance. If content on your website is not contributing to meeting your objectives you might consider removing it or demoting its priority within the sitemap.
Examples of specific and measurable website objectives include the following.
Another set of objectives you might want to include in your plan are those that relate to saving admin time. It can be harder to set numerical targets for these objectives but they are still valid and may be measurable to some extent.
Examples of objectives in this category include the following.
Define the actions you want people to take
To ensure your website meets your objectives you must enable your visitors to easily take certain actions. The website content, structure and design should be tailored towards prioritising these actions.
Examples of actions that will help meet the above objectives include the following.
A complete example
Here is a complete example of how an organisation might define their audience groups, objectives and actions. The downloadable template [link] provides a table like this one for you to fill in.
| Audience | Objectives | Actions |
|---|---|---|
Structure your sitemap
Your website sitemap is a hierarchical structure of all the pages on your website. A good sitemap provides simple navigation tools and helps guide users towards the actions you want them to take. Here is an example sitemap.
| Header menu | Actions |
|---|---|
| Home | |
|
About |
|
| Events | |
| News | |
|
Member area |
|
|
Participate |
|
| Join now |
The header menu is the place for most important page. Other pages can be placed in the footer menu which is accessible across the site. Here is an example of a footer menu.
| Footer menu | Actions |
|---|---|
| Contact | |
| Subscribe | |
| Publications | |
| Privacy policy |
Date:
14 October 2016
