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As the field of content strategy matures and advances, one thing remains the same: the ubiquity and importance of building websites.
Few practitioners are more versed in this craft than Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker.
Corey Vilhauer
Deane BarkerWhen they worked together at Blend Interactive, Corey and Deane wrote The Web Project Guide, a comprehensive book that can help anyone manage the process of creating and building a new or updated website.
We talked about:
- the birth of their book, The Web Project Guide, in the parking lot of a Cheesecake Factory in Omaha, Nebraska, and its development in Stockholm, Stuttgart, and other cities around the world
- their process in co-authoring the book
- the reasoning behind the number of chapters in their book and their length
- why they released the book free online as they developed it
- how the voice and tone of the book arose organically from their writing and editing process
- the website-development practices that inform the book
- the podcast that accompanies the book
- the delight they take in having created a beautiful, four-color, printed book
- Deane’s next book on the content creation and production process
Corey’s bio
Corey Vilhauer is director of strategy at Blend Interactive, where he is responsible for leading the strategic design process with a focus on content strategy and information architecture. Corey is co-author of The Web Project Guide: From Spark to Launch and Beyond, an overview of the web process from ideation to post-launch governance. He also writes at length about methodology, writing for accessibility, and shoestring content strategy at Eating Elephant, and writes about other things at Corey Vilhauer dot com. He is a recovering advertising copywriter, a closeted fan of professional wrestling, and a playlist pack rat.
Connect with Corey online
Deane’s bio
Deane Barker is the Global Director of Content Management at Optimizely. He’s been working in content management for 25 years, and has written four books about the patterns and practices of modeling, creating, managing, and delivering digital content, including “Web Content Management: Systems, Features, and Best Practices” for O’Reilly Media and the just-published “Web Project Guide: From Spark to Launch and Beyond.” Deane lives in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Connect with Deane online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 129. There’s a lot of fancy new stuff going on the world of content strategy these days, but good old-fashioned website building is still an important and ubiquitous practice. Few folks have as much experience in building and maintaining websites as Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker. When they worked together at Blend Interactive, they wrote The Web Project Guide, a comprehensive book that can help anyone navigate the process of building a new or updated website.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hey everyone. Welcome to episode number 129 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I’m really happy today to welcome to the show Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker. Corey’s the Director of Strategy at Blend Interactive Digital Agency in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. And Deane is the Global Director of Content Management at Optimized Lead. So welcome to the show guys. And I’d like to just start with, if you could each talk just a little bit about what you’re up to these days and Corey, I’m going alphabetically and in the order of my screen. So Corey, what’s happening at Blend these days?
Corey:
Well, we are – Hi, thanks for having us on. We are just rolling with my projects. We’re really focused on a handful of projects at a time and kicked off a few pretty big ones that we’re excited about, for the most part that’s just doing the work.
Larry:
And Deane, what are you up to these days?
Deane:
The biggest thing I have going on is that we just had our customer conference in San Diego. So I was in San Diego for six days and we had 900 people there, and partners and customers and employees, and that was our first big conference since Covid. The last big conference we had was late 2019, so I was out there for six days and we’re doing another one in London and another one in Stockholm, and I’m going to both of those. So, travel, in the fall and the spring, travel tends to kick up and here we are.
Corey:
Deane, does that mean the last big conference you had was when it was called something different and the company was called something different?
Deane:
Correct. We were called Episerver and then during Covid we acquired a company called Optimizely, and we took their name, and so this conference, it used to be called Episerver Ascend, and this conference was called Opticon.
Larry:
Optic. Oh, cool. Okay. I need to rebrand, but I love that one of the destinations you just mentioned is Stockholm and the opening anecdote in your intro to the book. And actually that’s what I, anyhow, I should set the context too.
Larry:
The reason I invited these gentlemen on the show today is that they wrote a book called The Web Project Guide, which is a really just outstanding, comprehensive, really hands on, guide you through every stage of any web project. But the opening anecdote in there, Deane, you talk about being lost in Stockholm, how the context of Google Maps helped you out. I forget exactly how that worked out, but anyhow, can you set the scene for us about where the book came from? The Web Project Guide?
Deane:
Okay. We’re going to globe hop like a Tom Clancy novel, because the book started in the parking lot of a Cheesecake Factory in Omaha, Nebraska. I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Live a mile away from Corey. Actually, I should set the context by saying that Corey and I at the time, worked at the same company. I was a partner in Blend Interactive, course director of strategy. We’d worked there together for 10 years. My daughter had a volleyball tournament in Kansas City, which is about five hours south of Sioux Falls, and so we’d driven the whole family down there, and on the way back we stopped in Omaha, we love the Cheesecake Factory. So my family was inside the Cheesecake Factory waiting for a table, and I was sitting out in the car and I was thinking to myself on the drive from Kansas City up to Omaha, I was thinking, you know what?
Deane:
I do sales at Blend and people are constantly asking me, “How does the process go? If we want to completely turn over our website, we completely want to rebuild. What does that process look like?” And so I thought to myself, I should write this down because I constantly have to explain this to people, I should write it down. So I remember very clearly sitting in the parking lot of the Cheesecake Factory, and writing down all the steps that we would go through to build a website, and that was the start of it. I think I probably got 15 steps, and then later after I got back to Sioux Falls, a few days later, I started to expand that and I kind of built it out in Google Docs, and I think I ended up at like 26. These are all conceivably from the absolute beginning to the absolute end.
Deane:
These are all the steps that we go through here at Blend, to deliver a website. I sent it to Corey, sent it to the partner, and I’m like, “What do you guys think about this?” And they made some changes and some edits, and then Corey being our content strategy guy, sat down and asked him to kind of flesh it out a bit. So for each step, Corey wrote two or three sentences and we made it into a marketing piece, which I actually still have lying around. We made it into a PDF that we were going to send to customers and literally we did this, so I didn’t have to explain this from scratch on every call. You want like a leave-behind to say, “Okay, well here’s this thing we talked about.” And so that’s how we started it. And we had that for a month or two, and then I was going to Europe a lot, and this would’ve been spring of 2019, Corey, is that right? Or is that wrong? That’s right.
Corey:
It was 2018, spring of 2018.
Deane:
So I was in Stockholm and there is a part of Stockholm called Gumla Stan or Old Town Stockholm. It’s kind of the old, it looks like a Harry Potter movie, it’s crazy, and I remember wandering around there and I thought to myself, I’ve got some time, I got a day to kill, and so I’ll take one of these things and I’ll try to expand it out to a chapter. Let me see if I can take one of these, turned it into a chapter because I had an idea in my head that this could be more than just like a PDF marketing then. And so I expanded it out to a chapter and that’s where the opening anecdote book came from. I was sitting in a coffee shop in Stockholm after getting lost in the Old Town Stockholm several times.
Deane:
And so I did that. And then I was in Stuttgart, Germany a few months later, and again, when you’re traveling internationally, you end up with quite a bit of time to kill, and so I took another chapter and I expanded that and I thought maybe we’ve got something here. But then when I looked at the steps, that the tail end of the steps, I’m the implementation guy, or I’m the CMS technical guy. So I was really great in the latter half of the project, but there’s that whole first half when you have strategy and content issues and kind of figuring out direction and plans. And I thought, I’m not going to be really good at that.
Deane:
So when I got back to Sioux Falls, at this point remember, I was sort of Corey’s boss. So I pulled Corey into my office and I shoved the list of chapters and I said, “Hey, we’re going to do this. We’re going to write a book.” And Corey said yes, and I don’t know if he said yes because you wanted to, or if I was his boss and I was telling him that we’re going to do this.
Corey:
We’ll never know. We’ll never know.
Deane:
That’s how the book got started in. So I’m going to defer out of Corey and ask…
Larry:
Well, I got to say too that’s funny, because one of the anecdotes in the book, you talk about how you were his boss, and I think, if I’m remembering this right, there was some edict that if Corey didn’t do a talk by the end of his first year, he was fired.
Deane:
Corey, why don’t you tell your perspective of how this started? Let’s see how good our stories match.
Corey:
Yeah, no, I that’s, that’s pretty close to what it was. It was really the focus. There was really two parts to it. We wanted to write this book because we felt like it was a really important, almost just for ourselves to get our minds around this. I believe really, really strongly in the idea that writers often write to form the thoughts in their head in a way that makes sense. I’m not great at speaking on the fly, I’m not great at putting together a process ad hoc, but I can write a bunch of stuff down and then realize that as I’m writing through it, I’m also processing all those thoughts. And so I feel like it was really valuable to see where we had gaps as an organization.
Corey:
It was really, really important in of helping me understand the scope of any large project in which as my position as director of strategy, I’m asked to help pitch sales and I’m asked to understand a little bit of project management, a little bit of development. But also the second side of that was later, like you said before we got on the call, there’s a thought factor to it. There’s like, all right, well Corey’s got a book now. Deane had a book, Corey’s got a book, and now I find myself trying to ask people at work like, “Hey, you probably need to write a book now.” It’s enough cache in the industry that having a book to your name gets you a little few more speaking spots and you end up on podcasts.
Larry:
And the intent of this podcast is to democratize the practice of content strategy, and a huge part of that is managing web projects. I don’t know exactly how many, the field is so specialized now, but I think a lot of people still end up managing these big web projects, and when you read the book, it sounds like you divvied it up kind of first half, last half-ish. Can you talk, Corey, or either of you, can you talk a little bit more about how you did? Does it pretty much align to how the practice was at Blend at the time you were writing the book? Or did you back away from that and think more generally about content, web content, and project management?
Corey:
It’s pretty close to how our projects went. I mean the way the book is structured, is 24 chapters. They are written short for a reason. Deane, do you want to talk about the five minute, the 10 minute or 5,000 word for…
Deane:
We had a plan. The plan was the number of steps roughly corresponds to how many working days there are in a month. And so our thought was, we wanted someone here who was our persona, was someone staring down a web project not knowing what the hell to do. The boss is coming into your office said, “Hey, we need a new website.” You have no idea what to do. We wanted to give you that idea. And so we thought roughly one chapter for every working day in a month, you could spend the first 10 minutes of your day reading a chapter and then after a month have a general idea of what you’re doing. So I remember clearly, looking up the reading speed of a college educated American, and it’s 350 words a minute, and I remember thinking, okay, 10 minutes, there’s 3,500 words per chapter. I thought those are shortest chapters, so that was the plan, 3,500 words. That plan lasted I think five minutes. So Corey, back to you.
Corey:
Yeah.
Larry:
Wait, so how much did it end up? So you obviously data driven Deane. What is the actual number per chapter?
Deane:
So there’s one chapter that’s 7,000 words. I know that for a fact. I don’t think any chapter came in under 3,500.
Corey:
I think we wrote them to be 3,500 with the idea that when they made it to five to six that we’re probably doing okay, which makes it a very large book, because it’s 24 6,000-word chapters.
Deane:
I maintain it’s a great weapon. I mean the book is 144,000 words and it’s heavy with sharp edges. So if you have to travel late at night, just carry a copy and swing it.
Larry:
Better that than a door stop.
Corey:
To go back, that process of coming up with 24 chapters, it breaks like our standard project into 24 pieces, but the idea was that really anybody can jump in there and they can pick and choose the chapters that relate to them, because I don’t think, very few projects that we’ve ever done have all 24 pieces in it. Some of them have 20 of them, some of them might just be the first half, some of them might just be the second half. And so they overlap in places. So the idea that you go from chapter one to chapter two to chapter three, isn’t necessarily valid either. So it’s a rough approximation of what a project might include, is what I like to say. It teaches you how a website is made, but it doesn’t teach you how to make a website.
Larry:
I like that distinction. And also it’s like the way, Deane, when you described the original persona, that sounds like the old webmaster, the person who did everything, they wrote the copy and they built the website and everything, but clearly we’re in a slightly more collaborative world these days. So to what you were just saying about that original persona and then what Corey was just saying about how you can, it sounds like you could almost use it a la carte for any one of those tasks that are described in the 24 chapters. Is that accurate?
Deane:
Yes. So we sat down 24 chapters, we tried to put them in order and then we realized there’s just no way to put them in a cohesive order. I mean, you’re really going to go back and forth. Here’s what we figured we could do. The idea for the book was that it was going to give you an introduction. We can put them in order for the introduction, but very clearly we had a section at every chapter saying, “This is how this step kind of comes out of order.” So a la carte is very, very true because the idea is that you would read the book and then maybe when you get to that point in the project or that point in the project is next, you would maybe reread that chapter, so you know what’s coming? But this is usability exercise. I would love to hear from people how they’re actually using the book. I don’t know that we’ve heard from anyone?
Larry:
That was my next question actually is, because you, Deane, just the way you talk, you’re so clearly data driven and I’m like a lot of that evidence in this kind of project is feedback about. . . The book’s been out, it’s been online for a few years now, and out as a book for a year or two anyway.
Corey:
Yeah, I think we just celebrated the year anniversary last month.
Deane:
Corey, should we talk about why we put it online? I mean, that was…
Larry:
I’m curious about, because I perceive that as, I love it because I’m all about sharing practice, and I think it’s also the modern way to do it, but yeah, can you talk about your rationale for releasing it online first?
Deane:
I think the biggest reason to put it online was that it was intended, very clearly and in no way do I mean this to diminish the book, but we both worked at Blend at the time and it was hopefully going to have some halo marketing effect for Blend. I mean, clearly for the value, trust me when I tell you, you don’t get rich writing books, so the idea of hoarding the knowledge and selling it, was not valid. What we wanted to do is get as many people looking at it as possible. So one reason was just to increase the marketing exposure for Blend, but the other reason was, and I won’t speak for Corey here, but there was a certain level of accountability by putting online we created kind of an event.
Deane:
I mean, we released two chapters a month and people knew about them in advance and we built kind of word of mouth throughout the book and we really got to a point, thank God, where we couldn’t not write the book. We couldn’t not finish because everyone was kind of waiting for it to finish. And I’ll let Corey talk to that, and then I can explain to you some of the practical complications that go with writing a book two chapters at a time. So Corey, why did you want it online?
Corey:
I have learned an awful lot from a lot of people, like everyone else’s books, blog posts. I don’t think there’s that many original ideas on the web anymore when it comes to how to build a site. We are all essentially building our practices upon the shoulders of people who built practices before us, and for me, what I was really proud of with what project I had, was that it was an opportunity for us to be able to take all of those different pieces and provide some kind of context to it and then be able to hand it off and say, “All right, well this is what we came up with and now you can now build upon this.”
Corey:
Most of the chapters are very heavy on references and we link to everybody that we, that’s the other nice thing about having it online is we were able to link to pretty much every resource we ever talked through, and we were able to put something out that provided a lot of use and kind of furthers the industry. And then it is incredibly complicated, which I guess Deane will probably jump on right now, especially when it comes to how to edit something like this.
Deane:
So when we actually got to the point where we were ready to publish the book, we did not have a book. What we had was 12 sets of two chapters written by two different authors. And I know from writing my first book, I wrote my first book for O’Reilly Media on web content management, and that was a very traditional book writing process. And I know from that is you don’t release the thing early, you have this kind of moment where you have the whole thing together and then you start editing it and having it make sense, make it to be a cohesive whole. We had done 12 releases of two chapters each, and we never had that moment, and additionally we had two different people writing it. So once we got all 24 chapters written and released on the web, Corey had to go back and kind of make a book out it.
Deane:
We had some tone and voice issues because the way that we did the chapter was, the idea is that the main narrative of the chapter was not written by one of us. It was technically written by one of us, but the idea is that the voice would be from both of us, and then we would have sidebars through the chapter, which had a picture of our heads and they would literally have some kind of thing. And that was going to be from each of us, so we had to go back through and the chapters that Corey wrote and then the chapters that I wrote, we had to make them sound the same. Also, we had to make sure they referred to each other in correct chronological order. You move things around a lot, and suddenly you mentioned, as we said before, and then you don’t realize that the thing you said before you actually moved after that part.
Deane:
So we had to do that. We had to figure out when we made references to things that we were talking about, did the references match. And so we did what we called the holistic edit, where we went through and the entire thing literally printed the book out and went through and edited the thing as a whole, because the book, as it was released, was basically a series of very long blog posts and then we had to turn that into a book.
Larry:
Hey, well one thing I really, I think with our audience, I love talking about the process and all stuff, but let’s talk about the content that’s in there too, but there’s, I think the rough outline of the book. I mean, the one thing I really remember jumping out at me is that Deane is a CMS vendor and CMS selection is chapter 16 of those 24. So I love that. So there’s obviously some thought that goes in ahead of the technical solutions, but could one or both of you talk about the flow of the book and the rationale for that? Because I think that probably speaks to your sort of approach to managing these kind of projects.
Corey:
Yeah, we are, at least at Blend, and I think most web shops, especially those that have a focus on design and content, we’re largely discovery first, and so I think we spend the first four chapters just saying, “What is it exactly you even want to do?” Before we even get into, I think fourth chapter, is finally selecting a team, and then the two chapters after that are researching users. The very first time a deliverable is really ultimately mentioned is, there’s a few, but when you get into site mapping and wireframes, things like that, and we’re just getting out of those chapters now on the podcast and we’re 10, 11, 12 chapters in. The larger part is trying to essentially frame the entire process as to why are you doing this in the first place? That’s why all of those chapters ended up at the start.
Corey:
And then we also focused, specifically when it comes to long term governance, maintenance, the site, we push those all the way to the end. That’s the difficult thing about this, and the feedback I’ve gotten, really the only negative feedback, I’ve ever gotten about it, is from somebody who might say, “Hey, well, isn’t a project a thing that actually lasts forever?” And I think Deane, in the book wrote well, that at that point it’s no longer a project, now it’s a product, now it’s a thing you have to maintain and it’s a living being, and obviously you’re not going to get to chapter 24 and be like, “Cool, we’re done.” You start cycling back, you touch other chapters again, you go back to chapter four, you go back to chapter 10, you go back to chapter 22, and so you’re kind of jumping all around the book when you’re actually putting together the process, but I think the idea of having the chapters in those orders was to have all that discovery stuff at the start.
Deane:
So as for CMS selection being chapter 16, I think that’s fair. If you divide the process into two parts, kind of discovery and implementation, let’s say 12 and 12, I don’t know if its exactly that way, I think it was 13, 11. We would as service company like Blend that does these large scale full stack projects, very much wants to do this discovery and then take a neutral view of your needs and how they might map onto a CMS. I’ve sold CMSs for a long time, and in reality, the CMS that you pick, depends on a lot of factors not related to strategy. Oftentimes you’re just redoing a website on your existing CMS and you know you’re not going to swap your CMS out. Other times you’ve already picked a CMS and now you have to build a website on it. So you already have the CMS in hand.
Deane:
Other times you’ve picked a services firm that you like and you’re going to work with, and they really only work with one CMS or predominantly with one CMS, so the idea that you are going to do your strategy and come to the CMS selection with an utterly neutral blank slate open to anything, probably not entirely realistic. There’s always some constraints that kind of map into that process, but in a perfect world, obviously you would pick your CMS purely on your strategy and your needs that came out of that. Doesn’t always work that way, but that’s the approach we took.
Larry:
Nice. I want to make sure we get this in this podcast, you mentioned your podcast, is it going to be like 24 episodes and then you’ll wrap it? Will it parallel the book or about your…
Deane:
We’re half done, we just did episode 12, so yes, it’s going to be 24 episodes. That’s all Corey, I have a…
Corey:
Deane shows up for the recordings.
Deane:
I have appointments in my calendar that say, “Show up and we’re going to talk to this person.” And I show up and I run my mouth and then Corey puts it on later, so I’ve done nothing there, but Corey, tell us what your first experience editing a podcast was like.
Corey:
Well, the first experience I ever had, I recorded my voice incorrectly, and so I had to rerecord all of my lines again. So I wrote out a script of exactly what I’d said and then realized that it somehow sounded worse, because now my voice was very clearly not the voice I used in the intro, but now I got it figured it out and it’s easy. When it comes to things like a podcast, I feel a little bit like I’m a control freak, I won’t let anyone else touch it, and so that’s why Deane just gets invites and he shows up and then I edit it by myself.
Deane:
Probably safer that way.
Corey:
Yeah, the idea is that Web Project Guide is, we’re essentially going through each of those chapters and talking to the experts that we referenced in them, the world of web tech books, and you have people on all the time. They’ve written some book about a very small piece of content strategy, and it’s incredibly well done and it really dives into what you need to know in that specific situation. What we wanted to do was provide the overall context to that. There was nothing that kind of said, “Here’s everything you need to do.” It made it very daunting to go into content strategy and realize there’s like 18 books, where do you start? And so we made the chapters really focused on here’s where you start, here’s everything you need to do.
Corey:
The podcast now goes into each of those chapters, and so for instance, when we did the one for content strategy, we had Kristina Halvorson on, and we talked deeper about various topics on content strategy completely separate from the chapter itself, and so the kind of idea is then you have two resources now. So if you’re going to go do a content inventory, you have our chapter on content inventories, which will help you get an idea where to start, and then you have a podcast we did with Paula Land, who has written a book on content inventories, and she can kind of talk through some of the details. And maybe if you learn better that way, then you have a better access to that information.
Larry:
I got to say, the way you’re just describing this is one of the things I was thinking about after we got rolling is, there’s so much change in the world these days, and one of the things that’s changing is the way people publish and share information, and a lot of it’s like what I think Noz Urbina would wrap up is omnichannel delivery and stuff, and so you’ve done a website and then a book, and now a podcast, was that planned or is it, that’s just how the world is, so that’s just how you did it?
Corey:
I don’t think we planned it specifically. I just have always wanted to do a webs or a podcast, because I like to hear myself talk, and I know Deane also likes to hear himself talk, so I thought it was perfect, but I think when we were initially looking at what this might look like when it went to print, when we actually physically printed copies of it, Deane talked a lot about, “How do we make this not a book?” A book is not really a book anymore, a book is links to videos, it’s chapters, we have a glossary on the site. It’s all of these different pieces that kind of branch out everywhere, so it becomes this crazy web project, multimedia empire, but there’s also only so much time. So the podcast is pretty much kind of, we can wrap our minds around the podcast.
Deane:
This is worth mentioning too, is that Corey and I both came to this realization while we’re putting it together, but a book, if you have a domain of information you want to convey, a book is probably not the best way to do that anymore. And I say that as a guy who’s written four of them, but people sitting down reading a long form book, it’s just not the best way to get the information out there. Now the problem is, and this is going to be very naval gazing into our industry, there is an enormous amount of cache value in having written a book. I wrote the O’Reilly book, the O’Reilly animal book on web content management. I wrote that six years ago and it has reverberated through my career very positively for the last six years, and writing a book, being a published author, that’s a big deal.
Deane:
And having done that, both Corey and I now being on the other side of that line, I’m not disdainful of it by any sense, but we understand that we’re no smarter than we were before the book was published, and just now we’re published authors and there’s cache value there, and so there are a lot of people with domain information in their heads, where the best way to get that information out would not be a book. It might be an online course, or it might be serious blog posts, or it might be a podcast, but they still want, justifiably want, to write that book because there is huge professional value in writing a book. And you know what? There’s personal satisfaction. I remember getting that first shipment of my O’Reilly book and taking that, they sent me 10 copies of it, and taking that book out there.
Deane:
I filmed it, I have a video of it somewhere. I mean, it’s a big deal. It’s like that’s the moment everybody ever wants to write a book. That’s the dream moment when the box from your publisher arrives, all the copies of your book and you take it out and now you’re a published author, and so writing a book is a very internal drive for a lot of people, and I totally get it, but in actual practical terms, if you want to get the information out there, I don’t know if the book’s the right way to do it anymore.
Larry:
But the way you just said that, it also reminds me that I think we’re in a completely digital world now, especially in our line of work, and to have a physical, tangible artifact. I wonder if that’s part of it too, just like, “Yay, there’s something I can hold in my hand.”
Deane:
And the book’s beautiful. The book is…
Larry:
It is.
Deane:
Really gorgeous. It’s Sam Otis. I’m going to bring Sam up. I bring Sam up all the time, he’s the lead designer at Blend. I’ve been in this industry for 25 years, Sam Otis is unquestionably the most talented designer I have ever known. He did original artwork for all the chapter headers. He did original artwork for the cover. The book is gorgeous, it’s printed in color, which is very rare. Let me tell you, if you pay for this book, Blend has lost money. I don’t even think Blend charges enough money to cost the printing costs. It’s printed in four color. The book is spectacular and very, very proud of it. It’s kind of a monument, like it’s a trophy. It’s a trophy for all of our work. It’s a beautiful, beautiful book. And I would encourage people, if you want to buy the book, buy a physical copy, you won’t regret it. It looks really great on your bookshelf.
Larry:
I completely concur. And a couple things about, well, one, should I bleep out Sam’s name so he’s not inundated with recruiting calls? Do that Sam’s like …
Corey:
He’s our next episode guest, anyway.
Deane:
So he is our next episode and I want to bring Sam up because Sam is a guy who will never promote himself. He just is not that kind of guy, and he is shockingly talented.
Larry:
Nice. Hey guys, we’re coming up on time. These things always go way too fast, but hey, before we wrap up, I just want to make sure, is there anything last, anything that’s come up in the conversation or that’s just on your mind about content stuff these days that you want to make sure we get to before we wrap up?
Deane:
I got another book floating around in my head that I’m thinking about writing, and here I just talked about how books aren’t the way to get something across, but what I’m very, very interested in right now is, content process. How teams of people get a domain of information turned into content artifacts. One of the things that we did at Optimizely in January this year, is we bought a company called Welcome Software, which is content marketing platform. And it’s the system that allows you to collaborate and move content through process, and in that we’ve identified the difference between content, which is just the pure set of ideas and message, and the artifact, which might be a webpage or a Facebook update. One piece of content turns into more than one artifact. And if we take even before the content, you have the idea, you have the inspiration, you have the creative moment.
Deane:
How do you get from there to artifact? How do you get from the moment where you’re in the shower and you’re thinking, “You know, that’d be a really good idea.” I think people might resonate with that piece of content. How do you get from that moment all the way through to webpage being published on your website? I’m really fascinated by that process these days. I’m throwing together some ideas on that. I don’t think the right answer is a book in terms of medium, but a book continues to be the most conveniently way to package a set of ideas. So it may end up that.
Larry:
Nice. Well, I’m looking forward to that. Corey, anything last from you or before we wrap?
Corey:
Well, while Deane was talking, I was looking for Lisa Maria Marque and Katel LeDû both wrote for a book apart, a book called You Should Write a Book. And they had a webinar, it honestly probably has already passed by the time this gets uploaded, but it was discussing whether or not you should write a book. They wrote a book called, You Should Write a Book, and then they were going to have a webinar that says, “It’s okay if you don’t also.” It’s like, “Here’s all the things you need to know to not know how to write a book.” I say this because I also have a book bouncing around again. What I realized writing, and especially promoting and talking about Web Project Guide over the past year, is that I initially thought that it was largely around context. It was originally around, “Here’s what somebody needs to understand in order to make better decisions. Here’s what a content strategist needs to know about development to be able to make better decisions. And here’s what a marketing director needs to know about the discovery process to make better decisions.”
Corey:
And what I realized over this past year is that actually what it helps most with is this idea of demystification, this idea of removing sort of the difficulties and understanding and comprehending what the web is. In a large part, I don’t know. I know how to drive a car, I know how to put gas in a car. I don’t really know how to do anything else, it’s just this weird mystic box, and so I find an expert to go to who can then do that work for me because I trust they’ll be able to get it done. There’s value in me understanding why the things I do are the way they are, so that I don’t jump in there and say like, “Oh, okay, well the reason that you need to have this much oil in it as it is for whatever reasons that your car doesn’t blow up.” I think that’s really true of web projects too. I mean, I think there are a lot of people who come in and they say, “I have to build a website and I don’t really know where to start.”
Corey:
That’s what the book is for, but once you get in there, it’s also, there’s a lot of terms. There’s a lot of weird jargon. We wrote an entire 24 chapter book, not once is the term content design mentioned, at all. Not because it wasn’t a thing, but because there’s just so many things, we couldn’t mention all of them, and imagine what that looks like to people outside of the industry, where you show up and you think you need to do all of the different things and you have a bunch of experts who are throwing stuff at you and you don’t know if it’s good or if it’s bad. I think there’s a lot of work that could be done about making the web process more client- and customer-friendly, to essentially demystify the entire process.
Larry:
I love that you frame it around demystification because I think when you just look at the whole process, the whole scenario, it can be daunting. So that approach, I love that. Hey, and one very last thing, what’s the best way for folks to stay in touch with each of you? Like social media handle or a website or?
Corey:
Well, I am on Twitter at Mr. Vilhauer, M R V I L H A U E R. I hardly ever post on Twitter anymore, because it’s kind of gross. I mean, I’m LinkedIn under Corey Vilhauer, I actually have a personal website, coreyvilhauer.com, that’s where I put, there’s links to all my other stuff. There’s links to Blend, but there’s links to Eating Elephant, which is my content strategy blog. There’s links to the podcast, mostly it’s links to newsletters that I write every month that are kind of around playlists that then Deane emails me and says, “I’ve never heard any of these people. Have you heard the new Halsey album?”
Deane:
Yes. I want to say for the record that you should be happy that I email you with detailed information about your newsletter, but Corey is incredibly arrogant and hipster-ish about his music, and I have been obsessed lately with the new Halsey album, “If I can’t have Love, I want Power”, and Corey won’t listen to it because it’s beneath him.
Corey:
Deane emailed me and said, “I’ve never heard of any of these bands.” One of which was The Strokes, which is one of the larger modern rock bands out there.
Larry:
Okay, I’m going to stick to getting my content advice from you guys. I’ll stay out of the music, but Deane, what’s the best place for people to follow you?
Deane:
Much like Corey? I have a blog too. I have a personal website, deanebarker.net. Deane, it should be noted as an E on the end. So it’s D E A N E B A R K E r.net. My Twitter handle is Deane, deane_barker. I’m on Twitter quite a bit. My personal website, deanebarker.net has all of my contact information and much like Corey links to everything I’m doing, and then I do work for Optimizely, which is a enterprise CMS and DXP vendor, and I’m often at conferences and you can often find me on Optimizely site, running my mouth about something.
Larry:
Right. Well, thanks so much to both of you. This is a really fun conversation.
Corey:
Thanks, Larry.
Deane:
Thank you for having us, and I just want to point out that Larry, your holding company is called, or your holding company or your business organization is called Elless Media. And in looking at the splash screen on Zoom, I finally got it.
Corey:
I did too, same thing.
Deane:
I just looked at that, I’m like, “Oh, I get it. I get it, and it’s Elless, E L L E S S.
Larry:
Yeah.
Deane:
And I’m like, “Oh, I get it.”
Larry:
I think this is in the air. A couple people at Button, I just got back, mentioned that. So anyhow, so I’ve been outed as like a neologist brander, I guess. So anyhow, thanks you guys.
Deane:
Thanks Larry.
Corey:
Thanks Larry.
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