Your CMS Can’t Judge Content Quality

How do we know whether our content is any good?  Unfortunately (or fortunately), a content management system (CMS) can’t tell us. That means humans have to judge it. But judge it by what criteria? I try to define some in my latest column for UXmatters, Toward Content Quality.

My inspiration was the Content Strategy Consortium at IA Summit 2009. Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic asked me to think about content quality.  I came up with some discussion points and received some useful feedback from the smart participants, reflected in the slides below.

Content Quality (It’s More Than Fixing Typos)

3 Responses to “Your CMS Can’t Judge Content Quality”
  1. Jeff GoldmanNo Gravatar April 16th, 2009 at 12:15 pm #

    I just read your post on UXmatters. I would only add (and this is my pet peeve) that graphics should also be thoroughly be reviewed. Too many people use graphics that do not relate to the content. In my case as an e-learning designer, the content must have some learning objective.

    FYI: I would have added this comment to your UXmatters post, but my company’s websense blocked me from accessing the Typepad sign-up, sorry.

    Thanks for the great post.

  2. colleenNo Gravatar April 16th, 2009 at 10:30 pm #

    Thanks, Jeff! Excellent point about graphics, especially for e-learning. I’ll also let the UXmatters folks know about the issue you experienced.

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