Making a Content Strategy Report
Laramie County is one of the biggest in Wyoming, containing Cheyenne, the capital of the state, and spanning a massive 2,688 square miles.
However, an area that they are severely lacking in is their website.
Looking like a flashback to the early 2000s, the Laramie County site has seen better days, and they are in desperate need of an upgrade.
In order to do this, we need to conduct a content strategy report, a deep dive into all the content within www.laramiecountywy.gov where we can determine what needs to change.
Content Strategy Report
One of the first aspects that we need to determine is the goals for the updated site. Looking at the county’s request for proposal (RFP) we can determine that there are three crucial goals that they want achieved in this new site:
Connect the community to the services and information they need
Promote tourism and business development
Increase community awareness and engagement
With our goals established, we can investigate the current site and its content, to determine how these goals are or aren’t being met.
Current Content and SEO
One of the first aspects we notice is the lack of any images or videos on the site, making it super text-heavy.
It also has quite a few PDFs as well, with over 164 being PDFs out of the 500 URLs that Screaming Frog SEO Spider scanned.
Similarly, SEO proved to be a major problem as well with 120 out of 129 pages having duplicate page titles, all named Laramie County. Meta descriptions weren’t much better with zero of the pages having meta descriptions.
With most of these pages having SEO problems, and few pieces of content throughout the site, it was clear that there needed to be updates done.
In order to stay on track with our established goals, we created core strategy statements, which establish out goal to proposed content changes:
To connect the community to the services and information they need, we will provide a clear and concise navigation and content layout that ensures residents, businesses, and visitors can find the information they need to operate within Laramie County.
To promote business development, we will showcase Laramie County’s expanding tourism market and growing commercial development to encourage potential businesses to create their next branch or store in Laramie County.
To promote tourism, we will highlight popular attractions and businesses to enable potential tourists to choose Laramie County for their next getaway.
To increase community engagement, we will create a new weekly newsletter, while also revitalizing the events and activities web page to allow community members to be more aware of when events are happening within Laramie County.
Content Design
Now was the time to start designing content.
To determine priority of content, we needed a prioritization table, or priority matrix.
This essentially separates the necessary site content into four areas:
The focus area includes content that is aligned with both business goals and user needs.
The drive area includes content that businesses want to drive users toward but isn’t necessarily the content users are looking for.
The guide area is for content that users find important, but isn’t aligned with business goals.
The low-priority area is for tangential information that needs to be conveyed but isn’t necessarily aligned with business goals or user needs.
We then moved towards organizing this content within a site map. This helps us know exactly where each piece of content is going to go and how pages line up within the navigation.
Lastly, we created a series of wireframes to showcase what the site redesign could look like. It includes most pieces of content mentioned thus far and how it is meant to be layed out on the page.
In these wireframes, it is clear the shift from a previously text-based site layout to one that is very image and video-forward. This is following popular design trends and the need now for sites to show more than tell, as attention spans for users has dropped drastically on websites over the years.
Another addition is the event calendar, which is an easy calendar that shows all the weekly activities going on in Laramie, which should create more community engagement within the county.
Last is the updated navigation, which focuses on the different types of visitors that Laramie County wants to attract to the site, residents, businesses, and visitors. From this, it should make it much easier to get people the information they need and also promote tourism and business development as well.
To determine the success for these content changes, there are some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that will show how well content pieces are working.
This was an extraordinary project to work on, and I had a great time diving deep into Laramie County to understand all the ins and outs of their site.
To see the full document, scroll down below or click here for the PDF!