Content Stewardship for Simpatico
Sometimes content itself is a client's biggest pain point.
We helped Simpatico clear a backlog of content preparation in their product catalog in the middle of the urgency of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Simpatico is a boutique housewares and gift shop in Northern California that had already begun a Digital Transformation to create new revenue streams online.
The Covid-19 Pandemic shut down virtually all businesses dependent on in-person traffic. Digital Transformations had to happen with great urgency. Proper content is an essential digital asset.
We offered 20 hours of pro-bono Content Stewardship work to Simpatico in an effort to help them through the crisis of the Covid-19 pandemic.
We guided the audit and preparation of the online product catalog for Simpatico. Solspace is where the rubber met the road for content integrity.
We made the content problem go away so that Simpatico could focus on sales and marketing.
During the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic we reached out to a number of local businesses in our area to offer web development support. In some cases, we did pro-bono work for businesses in order to ease their digital transformation journeys during a difficult time.
Simpatico is relatively new boutique housewares and gift store in Northern California. When stay-at-home orders were issued in California, Simpatico's in-store traffic dropped to nothing. Simpatico had to rely fully on their online store. Fortunately, they already had a great website being managed by an excellent local designer.
Simpatico's immediate challenge in their digital transformation efforts was content itself. All of their products were already in their POS system, they just did not have full descriptions, metadata, and imagery. We worked closely with Simpatico to make sure their product catalog was in proper form for optimal online sales.
On most of our client projects, in addition to creatively solving coding and functionality problems, we also find that we need to help a client with the burdens of managing and shaping their content. Sometimes this means we help with content strategy. Sometimes this means we help with migrating content from one place to another. Often it just means going through everything with a fine-toothed comb to make sure all content pieces meet a set of requirements. We're ideally suited for this because our position allows us to be highly efficient with this work through the combined use of productivity tools, automated processes, and plain old hard-won experience.
We call this set of services Content Stewardship. It's an essential activity in the creation, health, and maintenance of any website.
In our very first conversations with Simpatico, it became clear that our abilities with optimizing e-commerce flow or making e-commerce sites more reliable were not needed as badly as our abilities with shaping and shepherding content. Early on it became clear that this would be a job for Missy, our most dependable content and data resource.
Missy worked closely with the owner of Simpatico to assure that all products available in the online store met a strict set of requirements. Missy kept meticulous records and these facilitated a quick and easy audit process for Simpatico. They launched products in phases as each set of products became fit and ready for the web. Orders began flowing in steadily to Simpatico and they stabilized their business during the difficult time of the 2020 Covid-19 Pandemic.
