The Challenges
So, your startup isn’t quite a startup anymore, and now your website has organically grown into a monster where you and your clients/customers are having trouble finding what they need to make comparisons, assess your product or service’s benefits (maybe you now have three or four deliverables instead of one), and make an informed purchase or contract.
Or, your website used to be about that first product or service (or book if you’re an author), and now you’ve moved on to something different, but your new mission or product line is buried in your site under now irrelevant menu items with no simple path for visitors to get to it.
Or your database of products and services has a good initial set of search keywords, but now you have related subjects that only a human would pick out because a human knows what the terms mean, and perhaps you even have different humans using different terms for the same subject. What to do?
Enter Potomac Indexing’s collection of information access experts.
How Your Clients See Information
We look at content as subjects—as terms with meaning that help us navigate through information to answer our questions, find out more, and make decisions about what to invest in. Pretty colors and nice layouts on a website are great attention-getting aesthetics, but in the end, we want to find the content we are looking for in order to meet a need. And so are your customers.
How We Add Value to That Information
As information access professionals, though, we actually know subjects and names and their semantic and hierarchical relationships well enough to organize them in the optimum way to help your clients/customers find what they need and contribute to your business.
Naturally, we believe that content should be
- respected,
- relevant,
- organized,
- and discoverable.
PI offers a streamlined, scalable, reasonably priced service that addresses the content strategy needs of individuals with websites, as well as smaller companies with more complex sites or databases that need content re-organization.
We look at your mission, your deliverables (tangible or intangible), your business context, and your target clients/customers to develop the best content access structure for your needs. This is custom work, just like indexing a book (which is custom content, also); we build nothing but custom products.
Your Content Strategy Elements
- An appropriate content model—doesn’t have to be fancy, but PI will sit down with you and help you look at the bigger picture of what you’d like visitors to have access to on your site or in your database before we get into structure and labeling.
- Content structure and plan for use—this can range from an outline of content for an author’s website revision to a full taxonomic hierarchy and/or tagging plan for a company database.
- Basic metadata structure
- Content standardization and maintenance—as you add more and different kinds of content (not just text but images or video even) or go in different directions, you will find it most efficient to get a little expert help in integrating new content into your system.
How do I get more information? Contact us; we’d love to discuss your project.
