How to make content skeletons useful (and not a waste of time)
I guess that content skeletons are like the editor’s equivalent of a wireframe in web design.
You can use them to plan the bare bones of a page and show where different bits of content will sit.
It’s probably quite easy to think that skeletons are an unnecessary part of your content planning process — another barrier to overcome before you can start production.
But they’re genuinely useful and here are some tips on how you can use them well.
Help to share the workload
Skeletons can take different formats, so editors can spend as much or as little time on them as they feel is necessary.
A skeleton could simply be suggested headings with a list of what you will include under each one, like this…
Or you can go a bit deeper and do longer paragraphs, like this…
The main thing is that they should be less time consuming than a first rough draft, but more formal than back-of-a-fag-packet notes.
Your skeleton should provide enough detail for someone else to use it to produce a first version of the finished product.
This allows you to divvy up the workload of a project more effectively. If someone’s too snowed under to write up the skeleton, you can pick up their plan and do the work in their place.
Use them to ease into production
It’s likely that the sight a blank page fills you with dread.
A skeleton takes some of the sting out of starting production.
You can lay out all the key points from your research and then finetune tricky wording when you come to produce your first draft.
Skeletons also allow you to play with the design of a page.
For example, I worked on a site that made quite strategic use of coloured boxouts to emphasise different kinds of information.
Writing a content skeleton was a good way to make playing around with these highlights easier than going into the CMS and applying all the styles.
Similarly, you can mark out h2s and h3s to experiment with different page structures.
Cut down on duplication
If you’re working on a group project with several content people, there’s another reason skeletons can be useful.
Doing skeletons means you won’t have to waste time producing a draft, only to find out your colleague has got half the material you’re covering in their work as well.
Once the skeletons have been produced, you can get together with other members of your team to ensure that users will get the right information in the right place at the right time.
Read about how to identify who your users are
Similarly, skeletons allow you to give stakeholders an indication of how the project’s going.
You’ve just got be careful how to share them so you don’t get people from across your organisation giving you their 10 cents based on a preliminary outline of the work.
Tell them they’ll be invited to give detailed feedback when you’ve got something more substantial.
Skeletons are useful for pair-writing with subject-matter experts too.
You can work with your SME to get all the right information down on your outline.
Then you can have more freedom to work on the content design on your own when doing your first draft.
So do content skeletons! Or don’t! I like them anyway…
