Jamie Schmid: Content Enthusiasm – Episode 28

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Stitcher | TuneIn | RSS

Jamie Schmid is a content enthusiast. She has been building websites since the late 1990s. Over that time, she has honed processes that result in websites that give both internal and external users rich, intuitive content experiences.

Jamie and I talked about:

• her evolution from illustrator to website developer
• how Karen McGrane inspired her at DrupalCon 2013
• her subsequent growth as a digital strategist, with a keen eye on content
• the importance of being proactive about addressing content concerns in the website-development process
• how good communication with all project stakeholders helps clarify content intent
• how starting the content phase of a project earlier results in better content structure
• the importance of assessing as early as possible your content “why”
• the difference between what clients think they need and the actual solution that’s going to fix their problem
• how constantly asking “why?” can shorten up the development process
• how, when you design a website, you’re really building two sites, the end-user site and an equally, if not more, important administrative interface
• how working with internal site users early in the process improves the final product
• how the discovery that large projects are more prone to chaos inspired her to study information architecture
• the information architecture of the WordPress CMS
• how an intuitive, well-designed administrative UX can reduce training needs
• what she has learned in her new role as a content creator
• her insight that content strategy is best when it’s approached as an agile process
• her upcoming talk at WPCampus

Jamie’s Bio

Jamie Schmid has a particular passion for creating excellent content experiences. Originally from Milwaukee, WI, she has been working as a WordPress freelancer and consultant since 2012, regularly taking sites from conception through a well-managed build process that encourages communication, planning, and smart use of content. She has a background in Information Architecture and Content Strategy and a big ol’ enthusiasm for all things WordPress. Now living in Portland, OR, Jamie is a Community Evangelist for SiteLock, traveling the country and helping build awareness of website security best practices and solutions.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Transcript

Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 28 of the Content Strategy Interviews podcast.

Larry:
I’m really happy today to have with us Jamie Schmid. Jamie is a Portland based web developer and designer. She’s active in the WordPress world. She works for SiteLock, the security, website security company, as an outreach evangelist. And I’ll let Jamie tell you a little bit more about her background and what she’s up to.

Jamie:
Thank you Larry. Thank you for having me. So, I describe myself as a content enthusiast, and that came about in a meandering sort of way, which I think is actually a great way for it to come about. But I started my career as an illustrator in the mid-, late-ish 2000s. And I thought that my whole life was just going to be illustration, and I was working at a toy company, when the role of website manager was added to my workload, and it was my first time using a CMS.

Jamie:
It was TYPO3 and X-Cart, and I had no idea at that point you could do such a thing with websites. My experience with Web development was building some HTML, handmade HTML websites in the late ’90s, where I was literally calculating pixels, so that I could make, with streaming navigation, with image maps. So I had a much different idea of how websites worked, and then, 10 years later, it turns out, it was completely different.

Jamie:
But, in that world, I was often frustrated with the things that I was not able to do. There was a lot of going back and forth between the agency, and asking them to make some content edits, or just real basic things that I felt, in my very limited experience with Web development, that I should be able to do.

Jamie:
I realized that I wanted to do that. I wanted to do what those developers, on that end, were doing, and I sort of carried that, that initial frustration of not being able to do the things that I wanted, throughout my entire career. And I kind of started in, with accessibility, then at UX, and then, information architecture, and eventually, I focused on the CMS author experience.

Jamie:
Which is exactly what I was experiencing, and eventually, I found, there was a word for it, and there were people that were talking about this. That’s when I saw Karen McGrane speak for the first time at Triple Con 2013. And that pretty much changed everything for me, and my direction became more, sort of, dedicated to making sure that users of my website, the CMS website that I was building, had the tools that they needed, to be able to do what they needed to do.

Larry:
That’s interesting. So you came, you have … oh, just a quick aside. I just want to observe that everybody I’ve talked to has a unique pathway into this racket, and yours is …

Jamie:
Yeah.

Larry:
Again, unique. And I love that it was, Karen McGrane was the catalyst. Because she’s been the catalyst for a lot of people, I think.

Jamie:
Yeah.

Larry:
And getting their ideas set around content. And I don’t think you would identify, specifically, as a content strategist, but you’ve done, more recently, since about that era you’ve just mentioned, you’ve done a lot of independent design development and site building for clients of various kinds, and content has been the core there. I know, when I hear you … though I, first, just the way I met Jamie was, she did a talk at WordCamp Seattle last fall. And she was just so excited about content, and about how to do it right, and how to pry it out of clients, or whatever you needed to do, to get ahold of it.

Larry:
I think you exemplify a big class of people in that world, like the WordPress, and Joomla, and Drupal, and other worlds of people who would identify, mostly as a designer-developer, maybe designer, or an agency head, or something like that. But you realize, very quickly, that content is right at the core of that. Another thing that Karen McGrane has said that is that content is the gift. The code and the design are the wrapping, but the gift is the content. Does that accurately describe your attitude towards content?

Jamie:
Yeah, and you’re exactly right about I how sort of arrived at that place. It’s because I was originally a developer, and I was one of those developers that kind of sat in my corner, and took the instructions that came down for me, and built those things that I was given to build. But a lot of times, I was noticing that, when I failed to ask good questions that I had in my head, that those things eventually became issues further on in the process.

Jamie:
So then, I learned, I just need to talk to the designer, I need to talk to the project manager, even if I can talk to the client, to actually learn why certain decisions were made, and that brought me, that opened a whole world up, because now I was talking with … I was learning intent, and I was learning goals of things. A lot of things ironed out much easier. I wasn’t having to rebuild things nearly as much.

Jamie:
That eventually led to the content phase, which, like a lot of places, was the very last thing that we did on the website. A lot of times, there would be, like, “All right, the site’s done, now give us content.” I wasn’t immediately aware of that issue, because I had amazing project managers, that kept that away from me, as the developer. But sometimes, as I … at my old company, back in Wisconsin, as my role sort of grew, I was taking on projects, sort of from beginning to end, so I was talking with these clients, and I was managing this content.

Jamie:
I quickly saw that there was a big problem there, when, two weeks before launch, I was getting all these e-mails of, “Use this,” “Oh, no, wait, use this, here,” or, like, a folder full of untitled images that are, like, “Use the photo of Janet in front of the tree.” That happens.

Jamie:
Or, sometimes, I would get mailed a CDR of a brochure, and this was all happening at the last minute. On top of that, at this content entry stage, clients were, a lot of times, discovering that the site that we have built for them, the structure we had in place, wasn’t fitting what their content actually was. In the past, I know it’s easier to just say, “Just fit it in,” or even giving the client this, sort of, sense of duty that they have to make their content fit into this structure.

Jamie:
I realized, pretty quickly, that starting the content phase much earlier means that I can structure content better. I can build a much better site that is as flexible as it needs to be, because we’re now thinking about content, from the beginning, and that also helps sort of communicate to the client that this is, content is actually a process, and it’s going to be much bigger than you can expect it to be.

Jamie:
As the Web professional, I personally feel that it’s my role to guide the client in that phase, because they don’t probably about that, probably, anymore than they know about building the website that I’m building, so …

Larry:
Right. Hey, couple things in. There were two things in there that interest me. One, a lot of everything you’ve just been talking about kind of points to the importance of planning, and having a process, and having that content in there as quick as possible. But right at the very start, you were talking about intent and the why is, and how far has that moved up, in your process?

Larry:
Are you more attentive, and do you have, kind of ways of assessing that intent, and kind of … Because I know everything is easier when you have this kind of top level vision, that everything falls under an umbrella. How has that manifested that, that kind of why, and intent?

Jamie:
So, since I have … I’d been working freelance for the past six years, before I joined SiteLock, so I was doing sites from beginning to end. That’s when I was the project manager role. I was doing the discovery process, so I was able to talk with clients directly, and the why starts right away, when your design or discovery process, it has to start with why. Because that is going to inform every decision you’re going to make. It’s going to inform the type of website. It’s going to inform the design, so much.

Jamie:
I ask why a lot, and I will sometimes joke that I’m like a five-year-old that, you try and tell him something, they want to know why. And it’s not because, I’m just nosy, or I want to be knowing. It’s because it will help me build a better product …

Larry:
Right.

Jamie:
Experience, business, in the end.

Larry:
Well, there’s a couple things about that. First, I think you’ve probably seen that Simon Sinek video, about the importance of why … He says that people don’t buy what you do, or how you do it. They buy why you do it. Then he uses the example of Apple, and Martin Luther King, and people like that. But it talks about, Apple is like, “You buy our products if you think different. You need an apple.”

Larry:
There’s that kind of why, but then, there’s also, “What’s your business intention? Are you selling stuff, or are you just gathering leads? Are you a publisher? Are you an affiliate?” How do you elicit all those? And there’s other kinds of why, that motivates people, like values, that drive people, and identifying those can be important. How systematic, I guess, are you about identifying those different kinds of why?

Jamie:
Well, a lot of times, clients, or even when I’m working in an agency, and designers, and whoever I’m working with, thinks that they need something. But it’s really, the thing that they think they need, isn’t necessarily the solution that’s going to fix what it is, exactly that they need to accomplish. Sometimes, they’ll think that, “We need to build out so-and-so, and build it out in this certain way.” I’ll be like, “Wait. Why do we need this tool? How it’s gonna be used? What do you eventually wanna do with it?”

Jamie:
A lot of times it turns out there is a different way to go about it, that’s simpler, or more complex. So, I mean, I’m asking why at every stage. I’m asking why in the discovery stage, what goals, and asking it in the design stage. It’s like, they can tell me, “I love these two websites,” right? I could just copy them, but I could also say, “Why do you like them? What about this do you like?” Because I’m building them their own solution, and it’s not going to … their solution is absolutely not going to be exactly the website that they like, maybe, because of the color.

Jamie:
But maybe it turns out they like it, because it’s organized in a way, that, subconsciously, they really have a lot of success in navigating, compared to their current site. Then, of course, just as a base discovery process, I have a list of things that helps me kind of talk to people, and figure out what they’re trying to do.

Larry:
Well, I love that it doesn’t end there, though. That you said you’re asking why throughout the process. I’m just curious about that, because, does that loop get shorter, with your experience? Because some of the things, as you do this more and more, some things that used to slip by, you’re asking why earlier in the process. Does that …

Jamie:
Yes, it absolutely did. I’m able to ask better, more targeted questions. I’m able to get to the core of the problem a lot faster now, than I used to be, and that comes with experience. It’s not something you can really immediately expect to be a quick process.

Larry:
Right, and no matter how good you get at it, somebody will throw you a curve ball, and you’ll have a new one, and …

Jamie:
That’s what makes it so fun.

Larry:
Exactly, yeah. Hey, no, the other thing. One other thing we talked about earlier, I can’t remember what we talked, but anyhow, there is this discovery that you made, pretty early on in your consulting career, that you’re really, when you do a project like a WordPress site, or a Drupal site, or something like that, you’re really designing two websites. You’re designing that end user website, with the information you’re publishing, but you’re also, maybe equally, or maybe even more importantly, building an administrative user experience that is creating the work environment for the content creators and managers. Tell me a little bit more about your discoveries there, and how you work that into your process.

Jamie:
So, one of the things that I do, one of the ways that I sort of, express my own feelings of how important that is, is, I create the architecture of a site, and the admin, before I start building the front end of it. And I train the client on the content entry. People have different opinions on this space, and depending on the CMS you’re using, it’s not always as easy. But I like to get the clients thinking about content, while I’m building out the front end of the website, so they’re trained right away, on entering the content.

Jamie:
They have these, the structure, that we have identified in the wire frames, and maybe even in the design vet, it should be structured this way. But now, they’re starting, they’re working on a staging site, while I’m working locally, typically, and they’re entering content. So they’re seeing, right away, that this doesn’t fit. I make sure to say, “If it doesn’t fit, if there’s a problem, don’t try and make it fit. Let me know. It’s super easy for us to change it at this point.”

Jamie:
And then, as an added bonus, I’m able to pull down database content of their real content, as they’re having it, and as anybody who has ever been a designer or a developer knows, having real content to work with is like, the dream. It doesn’t always work out that way, because of the way content, the process, typically goes. But I’m well aware that this is the website that my client is going to be using, and then, I’m also designing the site that their users are going to be using. And those two are always going to be very different.

Larry:
How extensive do you customize things at the back end? I’m trying to think. This kind of gets into the other thing I want to talk to you about, probably, is this notion of structured content, and how you design your content structure, for end use, but also, use in the data entry, and the earlier process. Tell me a little bit about the relationship between those, I guess.

Jamie:
In about, midway into my Web career, I was working for a small agency, and we did mostly small websites. But I started to notice that, when we got larger websites, it sort of turned into chaos. I was like, “There’s something that I don’t understand. There’s something I’m not seeing here, that I don’t know, and then, that’s when I learned the term, ‘information architecture.'” I loved that job, and went back to school, to the University of Milwaukee, for information architecture.

Jamie:
They have an amazing library science department there, and I was able to concentrate on that, in more specifically, a digital sort of context. So that really, it sort of changed things for me, where I was now, I was thinking three steps ahead, compared to what I used to be, when I was just designing, and I’m like, “This needs to look good.” I was now thinking about content types, relationships between content types, reusing contents, rather than replicating it.

Jamie:
This is before I was even using any sort of API kind of thing, before I was even really, mobile, wasn’t even responsive at that point. But learning the relationships in things, and this is when I eventually moved to WordPress, and I discovered that WordPress actually is very, very powerful. It’s built in a way that you’re able to do powerful things with content. So is Drupal, for sure. But WordPress, it was something I didn’t realize that it had those capabilities, until I started working with it closely, so …

Larry:
Right. Yeah. No, and that’s interesting, because I came to Word … Well, I used to build websites by hand, and then, CMSs by hand, and then, got into Drupal a little bit, and then, got into WordPress. At first, when I got into WordPress, I was like, “Good Lord!”

Larry:
The underlying information architecture just defied everything I knew about relational databases, and entity relationship diagrams, and kind of how everything worked. But, at the user level, and “user” meaning both the designers, developers, building the sites, as well as the end user, it works just fine. It works out great, and I’m still, 10 years later, trying to get my head around that, but … yeah.

Jamie:
I agree.

Larry:
Yeah, but it’s interesting that there’s some juju magic thing there about WordPress, that even with, like, what had Drupal … because I have a lot of Drupal friends, who were, and other friends, who were not snobs, but they’re like, “Well, you need a properly designed relational database.” I’m like, “Nah, I’m pretty sure you don’t. You can power a third of the Web without it.”

Jamie:
I mean, to be fair, WordPress’s database is designed in a proper relational way. It’s not huge, because the way that, to be a little technical, the way that we think of content types is really, everything is a post. Some posts are hierarchical. Some posts are non-hierarchical, and each of those two content types have different characteristics, that allow them to interact in different ways. But you can tell one to behave with some characteristics that are only attributed to the other one.

Jamie:
The more that you learn about it, and the more you understand it, which is why, when I talk, I’ve done a few specific WordPress content modeling talks, where I get much more into those specifics, and I think it can be very confusing for people, and I think that they don’t necessarily want to learn it, because it seems like something that, as a user, is too complex. So my goal there is to show that it’s not all that complex, when you understand it, and when it’s explained to you in a way that makes sense.

Larry:
Yeah, I think I get what you’re talking about there. So it’s sort of like, at the end user level, like, people get, immediately, a different content type. Like, an event versus a post, versus a page about something, versus a bio, or whatever it is. So, conceptually, they get it, but how do you stitch that together, between the administrative use and the end user, and …

Jamie:
You just made me forget something. When I say “end user,” I’m talking about my editor.

Larry:
Okay.

Jamie:
So …

Larry:
I thought that might be the case.

Jamie:
In this context, yes.

Jamie:
My end user is different from their end user. That’s sort of how I think. But I’m also building the site that their end user’s going to use, but my end user is my client.

Larry:
Got it. Well, let me ask you about that. This occurred to me a few minutes ago, when you were talking about … like, I’ve seen so many CMS implementations, where the developers just go off and build it, and then, they come in and train you how to use it. Your process is entirely different from that. You’re …

Jamie:
Yes.

Larry:
Are you interacting with it, as much? It sounds like you try to interact with the content creators and managers as early and often as possible. Is that …

Jamie:
As I was saying, my experience at the toy company, that was frustrating. But then, after I went to school for Word development, and started getting out into the world, my first site was a Joomla site, and I was working for a nonprofit that had a lot of volunteers, and they had a large turnaround of volunteers. So, I built this site in Joomla, and I probably wasn’t building it in the best way that a very seasoned Joomla developer nowadays would build it. This is back in, maybe 2010, 2009, maybe? But I had to train every person to use that Joomla site.

Jamie:
This isn’t anything against Joomla, but I learned from that, and I learned that I don’t want to have to spend my time training new people, and creating all this complex documentation, and making it. What I was always, sort of on the lookout for, was a way to build a back end of a site that is just intuitive. It makes sense. You don’t have to go around looking for things. Then, in between there, I was working with Drupal, and that even sort of furthered my resolve, to find something that was more intuitive.

Jamie:
So then, when I got to WordPress, specifically, when I learned about custom fields, advanced custom fields, I learned about customizing the Admin panel. And then, so I had a little bit of a background of information architecture, so I knew about things like, how important labeling is, in your admin menus, and your custom fields. Then I also had a little bit of that US background, so I was building the pages in a way that also made sense, and was also … Really, it facilitated that ease of entering content.

Jamie:
Because there is a balance between, you want it to be flexible, but you also don’t want the admin to be spending all their time typing things into these discrete little fields, that don’t necessarily need to be discrete. So that’s also something that I learned. You got to find the balance, and it depends on the client, and it depends on the project.

Larry:
Right. Hey, I think, I have a feeling that all of what you’re just, or a lot of what you’re just talking about, might fit into this. But one thing I wanted to make sure I asked you about. You used the term, I think it’s in an upcoming talk that you’re doing, about, that you have this framework for implementing content strategy. Now, all this stuff you’ve talked about, there’s a lot of, kind of, many good lessons in there, and good examples of what you done. But have you articulated this as like, a framework that you actually hang projects on? Or how does that …

Jamie:
Helping someone else build and manage their content strategy is one thing. But then, being the person that needs to use your own content strategy, is a whole ‘nother thing. So, while I’m very good at taking clients through this process of finding their contents, and figuring out their governance, and their process for keeping and maintaining it. That wasn’t something that I ever really had to myself.

Jamie:
Now that I’m at SiteLock, and doing a lot of content, we are writing a lot of blog posts, and I learned a lot. Where I was like, “Wow, I have these unique challenges now, that I’ve never thought of before, because I wasn’t literally in the seat of one of my clients.” So, yes, now that I have both of these sort of experiences, it’s gotten a little bit more complex, I guess, because I understand a lot more different situations.

Jamie:
They’re situations I’ve encountered in my marketing department, are situations that I never encountered with a client, and that’s possibly because I never knew the questions to ask. I never knew how to identify those issues that we’re having, so, my talk, especially, my talk coming up, that’s going to be at WPCampus, in July, is not necessarily talking content strategy, from a content marketing perspective. It’s talking about, figuring out, how to get that content created within your organization.

Jamie:
In higher ed, there are so many more things that get in the way of you. Like, governance is a huge thing in higher ed. Tracking down in all the departments, and making sure that people have time to write about things. Not every department is the English Department, that is going to be gung ho about writing these things. So, this talk is going to be on rallying everybody, understanding this, that it is a process, that is unique to your organization, and it’s not a one size fits all.

Jamie:
So, what we’re going to do is, we’re going to go through a discovery process that allows each person to discover for themselves how this is going to work, each of these sort of steps. That’s pretty much what I’m going to be doing there. Because I’ve learned that I can’t just tell you, “Do this, then do this, then do this,” and it’s going to suddenly work, because that’s not the case.

Jamie:
On top of that, as I’m really learning at SiteLock, is that the content strategy is best when it’s approached as an agile sort of process. So that means, it’s okay if something isn’t working. It’s okay to re-evaluate, and try something else. You’re not locked into something, just because, at the very beginning, you thought that it would probably work. If it’s not working, try something else. You don’t want to be locked into doing something that doesn’t work, because, ultimately, people are not going to do it.

Jamie:
This is sort of like a project management rule, is: “The best tool for the job is the one that people are going to actually use.” So be able to adapt, when things aren’t working, and trying things that can work better. Those are sort of the two things that I cover in it.

Larry:
Got it, okay. I just noticed, we’re coming up on time, but I want to give you … I just want to make sure we covered everything. Is there anything last that we didn’t talk about, or that’s been on your mind lately, that you’d like to share with our folks, while we’re …

Jamie:
Well, I was sort of talking about the WPCampus workshop, which I’m very excited about. One of my good friends, Rachel Cherry, is putting that on, and it’s going to be in St. Louis, July 12th through the 14th, and it’s a WordPress-specific, higher ed specific conference, and I’m doing a four-hour workshop, that is going to guide people, all the attendees, through finding their own content strategy, and learning what they can, and what I can teach about that.

Jamie:
So I’m super excited about that, coming up. I’m a Community Evangelist for SiteLock, and my life has changed a lot, since I joined SiteLock. Not just the fact that I’m now on a marketing team, which, I’d never been on a marketing team before, and that I’m doing all of this sort of content strategy, on myself, but I’m also doing a lot of travel. I’m going to a lot more conferences than I ever did. I’ve always loved going to conferences, and talking at conferences, but I’m going to a few a month now, and so that’s, it’s like an exciting whirlwind.

Jamie:
We’re sponsoring a lot of events. I’m talking at a lot of things. I’m meeting tons and tons of people, like customers, and people that have had good and bad experiences, and that’s a super new thing for me, and I’m really enjoying it. So, I feel very fortunate, at this point in my career, that all these things that I’ve been doing, have come to this point, and I have the opportunity to be in such a dynamic role now. That’s very different from what I’ve done in the past.

Larry:
Yeah, I know. Everybody I’ve talked to has had some kind of crazy … A lot of people have been doing the same thing for 20 years. They just, all of a sudden, got labeled content strategists. But you’ve actually done a lot of different things, and your content has been this sort of …

Jamie:
Yeah. I was chasing that role. I was like, “This is what I need to do. This is what I wanna do.”

Larry:
Yeah, cool. Well, good, well, thanks so much, Jamie.

Jamie:
Yeah.

Larry:
This was a really great conversation, really enjoyed talking with you, and I hope to see you at a WordCamp, or another event soon.

Jamie:
Thank you so much for having me.