Foreword

FOREWORD

WHEN PEOPLE develop websites they talk about users. Users are weird creatures with strange intentions. They click everything, even where they are not supposed to. They rarely follow instructions. They are unpredictable. And yet we must love them. That is our job. Even when they are hard to love, even when they send us angry emails or tweet about how stupid we are.

When people talk about content they discuss readers. Readers are a known quantity. They start at the top of a page and go to the bottom, sentence by sentence. Sometimes they might skim, but often they’re fully engaged. They pause and think things through. They might even read the same section twice.

The reader is, of course, easy to love. Because the reader is us.

* * *

“It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure,” wrote computer scientist Alan J. Perlis, thirty years ago, “than ten functions on ten data structures.” He meant: focus on your data, then code around it. Applications are there to serve the data, not the other way around.

It’s a simple lesson but hard to follow. Mobile websites and custom apps have proliferated at a furious rate. They are costly and complex and have special data needs; ministering to those needs can take away from your ability to create great content. Worse, there are ever-more platforms. There’s iOS and Android and Kindle Fires and the web; email and SMS and Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. Every platform tells you that it’s the best, that it is worthy of your time and attention. But there’s always another platform.

Let’s put it another way: it is better to have 100 platforms operate on one content model than to have ten platforms on ten content models.

* * *

There’s a huge lesson in this book: that users have been readers all along. The rise of mobile platforms just makes this fact plain. Reader-users read differently than their forebears—they read Twitter to find links to long articles that will interest them; they switch between phone calls and the Kindle app. And yes, they watch video, play games, and listen to music. But language still knits it all together, and words have more work to do than they ever did before.

“The reader’s freedom,” writes the essayist William Gass, “is a holy thing.” As content strategists we are responsible for preserving that freedom. It’s a significant responsibility. Trust in the content, in the words, images, and experiences. Let content lead—the rest will follow.

—Paul Ford