Workshops (Monday, May 14)

Want to really dive into the details? Get down to the content strategy nitty-gritty with one of our all-day workshops.

Become the master of your content universe (minus the sword) with hands-on exercises, group Q&A, sample documentation, and methodologies for planning, creating, delivering, and caring for your content.

All workshops are from 9 AM to 5 PM.

Content Strategy 101: Start Here

The Team from Brain Traffic

New to content strategy? Want to brush up on the basics? Kick off your Confab experience with an introduction to content strategy’s key concepts, techniques, and tools. We’ll provide the baseline knowledge you need to get the most out of Confab—and more importantly—get down to business when you get home.

Writing for the Internet: Beyond Bulleted Lists

Relly Annett-Baker

Copywriting is a different game online. Yes, your writing needs to engage, inform, and satisfy your users, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. How can you work effectively with designers and developers? How can you structure documentation so it makes sense to the rest of your team? Is writing for mobile any different? We’ll give you the tools you need to make you the hero on any content project.

Taxonomy, Metadata, and Search: Put Your Content to Work

Seth Earley

As a content strategist, creator, or manager, understanding the role of metadata in search and any CMS isn’t optional. And with the shift toward structured content, learning how to prepare your content for multi-platform distribution is equally important. This workshop will introduce you to information management best practices. You’ll also learn about the important relationship between content maintenance and content governance and the role they play in any CMS.

Content Measurement: Essential Techniques for Measuring Your Content’s Success

Angela Colter and Christine Perfetti

How can you be confident that your content pages are understandable? How do you assess if the content is appropriate for your audience? How do you ensure you’ve written content that effectively communicates the essential information? In this workshop, expert usability professionals Angela Colter and Christine Perfetti will share several powerful techniques for measuring your content, including:

• Traditional usability tests: You’ll learn all of the basics for conducting your own usability studies.
• 5-second tests: A popular low-tech technique to collect quick feedback on whether your content pages communicate clearly to readers.
• Comprehension tests: A simple user research method to assess whether users understand your complex content.
• Inherent-value tests: A two-phase test that explores whether your content communicates the intended value to readers.
• Cloze tests: Another type of comprehension test where words are deleted from the text and readers are asked to fill in the blanks.
• Readability formulas: An easy—some would say misleading—way to estimate the level of education required to understand text.
• REALM: A quick word recognition test that helps you identify readers who have low-literacy skills.