Content Strategy for the Web
Kristina Halvorson's 2009 book that turned "just write the content" into a strategic practice.
For years, web projects imploded the same way: designs looked great, the CMS worked, but nobody had planned for the actual words, images, and video. Content was left to the end, rushed, incoherent, unusable. Kristina Halvorson wrote the book that gave content a seat at the table—and a process to make it work.
"Content strategy plans for the creation, publication, and governance of useful, usable content."
Content Audits
Inventory what you have. Every page, every asset. Quantitative (how much) and qualitative (how good). You can't strategize about content you don't understand.
Editorial Strategy
Define voice, tone, messaging, and guidelines. Who writes? What's on-brand? What's the editorial calendar? Strategy answers these before production starts.
Governance
Content needs care and feeding after launch. Who owns updates? How do you archive? Who approves changes? Governance prevents the inevitable content rot.
Workflow & Roles
Who creates, edits, approves, publishes? Map the content supply chain. Define responsibilities. Bad workflow is why content projects fail.
Metadata Strategy
Structure the data about your content. Tagging, taxonomy, categorization. Metadata makes content findable, reusable, and scalable.
Substance & Structure
Content must be useful (substance) and usable (structure). Both matter. Great writing buried in bad IA doesn't work. Clean structure with weak content doesn't either.
The book's brilliance wasn't inventing new ideas—it was codifying scattered practices into a repeatable discipline. Halvorson made content strategy teachable, sellable, and defensible. She gave it a vocabulary and a process. She made it real.
Kristina Halvorson was mad. As founder of Brain Traffic, a Minneapolis-based consultancy, she kept getting called into web projects at the eleventh hour with clients saying "just write the content." Projects were over budget, nearly done, and content was an afterthought. Nobody planned for it. Nobody resourced it. And it always failed.
In December 2008, she published "The Discipline of Content Strategy" on A List Apart, articulating the problem and defining the practice. The article went viral in the UX community. Jeffrey Zeldman later said it "changed our field forever."
In August 2009, Halvorson published "Content Strategy for the Web" with New Riders. The slim 192-page book became the gold standard—practical, jargon-free, brutally honest about why projects fail. It covered audits, governance, workflow, metadata, and the messy reality of content creation. A second edition followed in 2012 with co-author Melissa Rach.
By 2009, Halvorson had organized the first Content Strategy Consortium to formalize the discipline. In 2010, she founded Confab, the Content Strategy Conference, which became the field's marquee event. Content strategy became a recognized job title, a curriculum track, an industry.
Late 2000s: The Web Matures. By 2008, the web wasn't new anymore. Companies had been through multiple redesigns. Content management systems existed. User experience was a recognized discipline. Information architecture had matured. But content—the actual substance of websites—was still treated as a last-minute task.
The "Just Write the Content" Problem. Designers designed. Developers coded. Information architects structured. And everyone assumed someone else would handle the words. Clients expected to "provide content" but had no capacity, no process, no understanding of what that meant. Projects launched with lorem ipsum still in place.
Scattered Practices, No Discipline. People were doing content strategy work—Gerry McGovern wrote about web content management, Ann Rockley focused on enterprise content, Rachel Lovinger wrote about information architecture and content. But there was no unified field, no shared vocabulary, no career path called "content strategist."
A List Apart as Catalyst. A List Apart was the intellectual home of web standards and UX best practices. When Halvorson's article appeared in December 2008, it reached exactly the right audience—designers, developers, and UX practitioners who were frustrated by the same content failures. The article gave the problem a name and the solution a framework.
The Book's Impact. "Content Strategy for the Web" became essential reading not because it was revolutionary theory—it was a practitioner's handbook. It told you how to do content audits, how to write governance models, how to map workflow, how to justify budgets. It was the manual everyone needed but nobody had written.
Building a Profession. Halvorson didn't just write a book—she built infrastructure. The Content Strategy Consortium created community. Confab created a venue. Brain Traffic trained practitioners. By 2016, content strategy had normalized: it was a standard role, a conference track, a graduate program focus. UX teams expected content strategists.
Why It Endures. The core insight—that content is a critical asset requiring strategic planning and governance—remains true. The specific tactics evolve (mobile, voice, AI, omnichannel), but the fundamental discipline holds. You still need audits. You still need governance. You still need workflow. Halvorson gave content strategy the foundation it needed to grow.