Feature

This is not an article about gamification. Unless your website is devoted to dragons, adding quests and hit points won’t improve your users’ engagement with your content. (If your website is devoted to dragons, well that’s just awesome.)

Content – be it text, images, video, data, or a combination of mediums – is the reason we build websites in the first place. It’s right there in the acronym: CMS. Drupal is a system – or more accurately, a framework – for managing content. We strongly believe that all website features, layout, and design choices must support the goal of serving your target audiences with the critical information – the content – they need to engage meaningfully with your organization.

Your content is the connection between your organizational goals and your audiences’ motivations. There’s usually a reason a piece of content is added to a website; somebody, at some point, thought it would be useful. Unless that content has meaning to your users, however, it has little value to your organization. Without a strategy guiding the creation and governance of that content, your quest, noble though it may be, is almost doomed to fail.

Fortunately, it’s not hard to start creating a strategy. We believe you can learn the foundations of content strategy for Drupal websites by breaking down what the team at BioWare did in creating Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Goals and Audiences

You have to start with goals.

BioWare’s basic goal is easy to suss out: they want to make money. To support such a massive undertaking – creating Inquisition involved programmers, writers, producers, graphic artists, vocal talent, project management, and more – the end result had to be a game that would appeal to enough people not only to pay for expenses, but to turn a profit. (We have a strong suspicion the team also wanted to turn around the negative reception Dragon Age 2 met by releasing something that would blow more than a few minds.)