After seeing the book mentioned in a Karen McGrane keynote, I decided to pick up Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for the Future-Ready Content by Sara Wachter-Boettcher. It’s a somewhat lengthy but easy read with great examples and helped me gain a better perspective on the work that I do.
What is the book about?
As you can probably surmise from the title, Content Everywhere looks at content strategy and content creation for a better experience in various contexts. With content appearing in snippets on a summary page, or being arranged in a responsive design, or being fed out via an API, your content needs to be broken down (or chunked) in a way that makes the content more versatile than just entering all your content into a big rich text editor.
Who is this book for?
Content Everywhere is a good read for someone just getting into larger content management systems, both from a development side and especially from the content creation side. The book is really targetted to the latter but developers would gain some insight on how they build out interfaces for content creators.
I read this book and tried to map the concepts to the work I’m doing at Shopify. While we are an e-commerce platform, we are also a content management system. How do we facilitate the chunking of content to allow for easy reuse. The book gave me ideas and helped me reframe the work we’re doing.
As a seasoned CMS developer, especially at the enterprise level, the book didn’t offer up much new insight. However, I liked the way that it frames content management problems in contexts beyond just the standard desktop environment most of us create in. Content Everywhere is true to its title when it talks of content in responsive (or adaptive) web design and APIs and provides great examples as demonstration.
Somewhere around 18% of the web is powered by WordPress. The humble blogging platform has grown into a web-titan of monster proportions.
