From Content Strategy to Drupal Site Building: Connecting The Dots with Ronald Ashri

Summary: Ronald Ashri, former CTO at BlueSpark is now a Founder at Roomify - a Drupal-centric startup focusing on online reservations. Here, Ronald presents an enjoyable and valuable session about content strategy and Drupal, full of practical and actionable advice – worth watching in full for all strategists, site builders, and anyone who wants to know how to build a better content-oriented site. Before we got to that, Ronald and I had a great chat, covering Roomify, the Drupal Rooms module, Italy Magazine (a Bluespark property), Ronald's history in Drupal (from taxonomies to breaking backwards compatibility – aka "willingness to change" – as a competitive advantage), selling open source benefits to businesses, building out into new markets with Drupal technology, and more! Session description Title – From Content Strategy to Drupal Site Building: Connecting The Dots Abstract – Organizations are increasingly becoming far more appreciative to the value of a carefully developed content strategy. There is, however, a gap to bridge between concepts and strategies proposed by a content strategist and the practical implementation of those in Drupal. Our aim is to help bridge that gap by directly relating Drupal concepts and tools to content strategy, providing a common framework where the two disciplines can meet. Through the use of practical examples and references to available modules we will show how different approaches to Content Strategy can be practically implemented on Drupal sites. The aim is to equip Drupal site builders with a handy toolkit that will allow them to implement a content strategy and help content strategist better understand the tools and capabilities of Drupal. Takeaways How different aspects of content strategy relate to Drupal site building. Different approaches to building content types and an overarching framework for guiding decisions. Best practices in using fields. How to structure information through vocabularies and navigation. What workflows should you be considering. Helping content strategists through analytics. Wider engagement strategies and social media. Session quotes Ronald's session is full of useful information. Here are a couple of points that stuck in my mind. Regarding the unique Drupal site builder role: "The Drupal Site Builder is often an unrecognized Architect, assimilating a wide range of concerns and implementing them in a way that can support evolving needs." What does successful content strategy look like? Content is not bound to a page - flexible and future-ready We can provide the content that best stands a chance to fulfill user goals given context Finding, using, sharing and repurposing content is easy Message and editorial vision clear Content creators can focus and enjoy the process, not fight with technology to get their message out We know it works because we measured it Guest author dossier Name: Ronald Ashri Twitter: @ronald_istos Work affiliation: Founder, Roomify – Roomify creates reservation solutions that make it easy for people to book services and a pleasure for businesses to manage. The company is the creator and maintainer of Drupal Rooms - an open source solution for reservations on the web." LinkedIn profile: Ronald Ashri Italy Magazine: "Everything Italy. Authentically Italian." Learn more about content strategy Video: Content Strategy for the Web, presentation from the Acquia Engage conference. Kristina Halvorson, author of “Content Strategy for the Web,” discusses the challenges and strategies for developing a content strategy that will truly serve your needs. Video: Improve the ROI of Your Drupal Site with an Updated Content Strategy, webinar recording with Dawn Borglund, Sr. Digital Strategist,...