Customer Reviews

The Web Content Strategist's Bible: The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am a seasoned copywriter and burgeoning content strategist. My current project is a large scale financial Website. To prepare, I joined some content forums on the Web and sought out the best books available. Three made the cut and The Web Content Strategist's Bible is already a treasured reference. Richard Sheffield gave me absolutely essential ideas for improving my matrices which I can implement immediately. The book also introduces aspects of our discipline that I plan on applying to future projects.

The Web Content Strategist's Bible is well organized and easily digestible - just like good Web content. It is a breezy, but never superficial read. TWCSB gives a complete picture of the expected duties and deliverables for a strategist, so the book is excellent for those just entering the field. However I wouldn't say the book is only for newbies. TWCSB is suitable for anyone who deals with content and has the sense that things are being overlooked or that workflow could be improved. Sheffield clearly outlines the different project phases and associated challenges. Small organizations could use it to help create their content process and make the business case for having a strategist.

Make this part of your required reading and you will automatically be several steps ahead of your competition.

I am a marketing manager tasked with managing the content process for our site redesign. This book has been a LIFE SAVER and helped me understand the exact steps that I needed to go through to manage the content build. I bought three books: Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko which has good information but is overwhelming at this stage in my learning as it is the size of a phone book! And Content Strategy for the Web by Kristina Halvorson, which was easy to read and had good information as well but seemed more theoretical. The Web Content Strategist Bible was extremely easy to read, straightforward, process-oriented and tactical. The book and the online bonus material were exactly what I needed to effectively manage the content in our web redesign.

While this book was a good overview, I couldn't help but feel that it was lacking on details. It was a very quick read (read it on the train on the way to work in one day), and I felt that it would be a helpful resource for someone considering a career change to content strategist. However, only a few pages were actually devoted to the nuts and bolts of Web content strategy, SEO, etc. This would be a better book for someone who is entirely unfamiliar with what a Web Content Strategist does and what is involved in the process of a Web site relaunch (or launch). If you are already familiar with these things, this book probably won't bring much to the table.

Richard Sheffield gives us one of the best resources I've encountered for the still-nascent role of Web Content Strategist. His slim volume is packed with practical advice, valuable tools such as spreadsheet templates, and real-world examples from his own experience. He deftly tracks the journey of the Content Strategist through the entire cycle of a website's development or redesign, detailing specific tasks to be accomplished at every phase. I look forward to consulting this little gem of a resource quite often.

I'm surprised this book got so many high ratings. I got this as a Xmas gift and was very disappointed at how small it was considering it describes itself as a "bible." It's definitely not "bible" worthy. Also, pay attention to the full title, which includes: "The Complete Guide To A New And Lucrative Career For Writers Of All Kinds." The author immediately states that he intends to focus on web writing/editing in the book, while almost ignoring all the other content that a real web content manager might have to deal with as a professional.

Considering the small size of the book and restricted topic, this would be only one of many other books you would need to understand web content management.

This book provides a wonderful compilation of things to consider for managing content in a Web-based environment. The author argues convincingly about the importance of a "Web Content Strategist" and outlines in detail the importance of this role in Website development. As an aside, this type of position (differently named, but with similar types of duties) was always part of the "traditional" publisher model, but never made its way into the Web, for some reason.

But the presentation of the information is perhaps not so good. And the author winds up undermining the very cause he is arguing. The book is chock full of typographical, page-layout, and editing-oversight errors. I found these errors to be distracting after awhile and ended up wondering if the book wasn't just a complete bluff, the same way I feel after I read a resume that has a lot of typos in it: the author doesn't care.

So a five-star rating (where it should be) drops to a three-star rating.

While some of the information was good, this book should have been half the size and 10-15 dollars. The design of the information was very poor. It was obvious they made design decisions with font size and spacing to extend the size of the book so they could charge 25.00. This made it difficult to read. What I did read could have been more professionally written and could have been more pointed. And the information mapping that stretched for pages was not usable. I think they could have used user-centered design when writing and planning this book.

I think it is a good first draft but not worth the money to purchase in this form.

This book provides a solid overview of the work performed by those working in the new job role of content strategist or content manager. It also provides useful insights on the tasks and processes involved in a content management project. However, the obvious lack of copy editing and poor page design distracts from the author's message and may give the erroneous impression that these skills are not important in a corporate content manager's job. Read it as a good introduction to this field, then look for other books to use as ongoing job resources.

I went from copywriter to content strategist when I changed jobs several years ago, and with my new job also came many project management responsibilities. In either of these roles--content strategist or PM--I would have loved to find this book much sooner. The author reviews the overall process for web projects, and within that framework offers practical and specific content tasks to be completed at each phase, and the documents to use for tracking them. While some chapters of this book have become somewhat outdated (particularly those on content management systems and SEO), these tactical methods for wrangling large content projects are still current and will be useful for many years to come.

I purchased this book a couple months ago and it has been a HUGE help to me in my job. My role had been defined as a "web editor," but I soon realized there was a lot more to it when I started hearing about and researching "content strategy." I'm in the early stages of an extensive website overhaul, and really had no idea where to start or what to do until I got this book. I've employed many of the tools and strategies he discusses and they've really helped me become more organized. I now feel like I have a much better handle on the process. The book is easy to ready and easy to follow. I highly recommend it!