Establishing a content strategy before jumping into content design is crucial when rebranding. In The Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey says that “organizations and practitioners tend to jump into designing content before defining a strategy that clarifies what content users need and how it should support business goals.” This week, I began content design plans for HealthReach: Community Health Centers. Before I created the designs, I looked at the organization’s goals and decided on what strategies best fit those goals.

Prioritization

In The Content Strategy Toolkit, Casey explains that “prioritization is how you determine what content you need to meet your audiences’ expectations and how you can achieve your organizational goals.” In order to decide what to prioritize, I had to start by understanding HealthReach’s goals. When reviewing HealthReach’s RFP, which means a request for proposal, I determined what goals would be important to prioritize. The organization wanted to showcase its health centers, and the programs they have, establish a clear path for visitors to access information relevant to them, and function as a hub for other web-based enterprise systems and patient/prescriber tools. With these goals in mind, I started thinking about the best content design tactics.

Sitemaps and Wireframes

Sitemaps and wireframes are key to starting your content design journey. First, I worked on the sitemap. In the Webflow article, “The modern web design process: creating sitemaps and wireframes” Jeff Cardello explains that sitemaps provide “a diagram of the site’s hierarchy and shows where each page fits into this hierarchy.” To showcase the health centers at HealthReach, I planned a location page that would lead to a list of all of the centers. To highlight all of HealthReach’s programs, I planned a program page that would have links to all of the programs with detailed information on each one. To establish a clear path for visitors to access information relevant to them, I planned a services page that would lead to links to all of the services with detailed information on each one. Lastly, to function as the hub for other web-based enterprise systems and patient/prescriber tools, I planned a portal page with access to patient tools. After planning out each page and creating a sitemap, I worked on wireframes for the pages. Cardello states that “if a sitemap provides the blueprint for your whole website, a wireframe represents the blueprint for a single page.” I planned out where all of the images would be on each page, as well as the various text and links. 

Now that there is a clear plan in place, both on the strategic side and the design side, rebranding HealthReach will go a lot more smoothly.