Blog Post
June 15, 2022
Welcome to the Content Strategy Seattle website! We invite you to poke around, learn about our upcoming and past events, and discover resources on topics of interest to content strategists.
Content Strategy Seattle is the organization behind the Seattle content strategy Meetup. As mentioned on our About page, the Meetup itself has been around and active since 2009. A year or so ago, however, we started feel the limits of the Meetup platform as a place to communicate with our members and share the resources that come out of our monthly events (slides, videos, lists of recommended articles, and so on). So, we decided to create this site as a central hub for our activities.
Just as good content strategists should, we started out with a plan. We wanted to make the construction of this site a case study and use the best practices we would apply to any of our “day job” projects.
The organizing committee met to discuss our goals, objectives, and tactics to articulate a strategy for the site. To learn more about and gather input from our membership, we conducted a survey that asked questions about our members’ job roles, types and sizes of employers, and topics of interest. Those topics fuel both our event programming and the resource lists you’ll find on this site.
Based on the strategy we developed, one of our volunteers, Amy White, took on the task of building the site.
With her training in Object-Oriented UX (OOUX) and her previous experience with the Webflow CMS, she led the organizers through the process of identifying the structural elements of the site.
We identified 5 main objects that make up the majority of content on the site, and brainstormed the relationships between them. Then we fleshed out the attributes of each object (for example, event has a description, date, time, and location). This discussion helped us clarify all kinds of ideas about how the site, and even the organization as a whole, could work going forward.
OOUX uses the power of structured content to create a system that can scale as the site and the organization grow. Some of these objects became collections in the Webflow CMS right away, while others can be kept in reserve until we need them.
And finally we started building layouts in Webflow! It's a great fit for OOUX because it's easy to create connections between collections, but there are some subtleties - if you're interested in learning more about this, there are some great articles on OOUX.com!
To guide the look and feel of the site, we developed a creative brief and put out a call for visual design help. That call was answered by another volunteer, Megan Biggs, who worked with us to come up with a palette, fonts, and graphics. We wanted the site to reflect our beautiful Pacific Northwest location (recognize Mount Rainier in our new logo?) -so the colors and imagery were chosen to evoke that feeling.
Amy and Megan worked together to use another OOUX trick - avoiding "shapeshifter objects" in visual design. When designing cards for events, blog posts, and topics, we tried to make sure they look the same everywhere they appear, and that they look different from each other.
The content of the site is driven by our events, so you’ll find a list of past events going back several years, with links to slides and videos when we have them. As mentioned above, we also pulled from the results of the survey and from our events a set list of topics for curated resource lists. We intend to grow those lists over time and you’ll note that there is a way to suggest additions, so please let us know what we missed!
We would also love to have your input in other ways. This blog is intended to be community-sourced, so we welcome your interest if you want to contribute. We are also hoping to develop a mentorship program and eventually present other types of events, so stay tuned for additional ways to engage with the content strategy community.