It’s usually design, user experience and high tech breakthroughs that take the cake as hot topics at SXSWi. This year, I was surprised (and delighted) to notice a content revolution taking place. The push? Treat content as a living, changing element of your website and your company’s overall online presence.

When we talk content, we’re not just referring to text on a page. Everything from the error messages that pop up on the site to video/audio clips fit under the content umbrella. Each piece of content should work together with the design and other site elements to enhance the user’s experience and engagement with your brand.

This sounds like a big task, and it is, but it’s doable. It all starts with content strategy. It may entail auditing the current content on your website and working from there to improve your cohesive messaging throughout the site.

The Content Strategy Plan:

Audit. Look at your website, Twitter, Facebook, microsites, etc. Check for relevancy and consistency. Anything redundant, outdated or trivial goes.

Ask. Why do you have this content? Who is it for? Who’s writing it? How often does it get updated?

Analyze. Take a look at your current content and determine what you need to create.

Align. Content does evolve. Create a plan for its life cycle, and involve the appropriate parties.

Assume responsibility. You are a publisher. Take responsibility for your content.

Interested in brainstorming ways that a content strategy plan or editorial calendar could enhance your brand online? Let us know!

1. If you do not let users add content to your site (photos, videos, links, reviews, etc.), then you need to make that your primary goal for 2010.

2. Scanning barcodes with your smart phone for more information, pictures and videos is a trend  we need to all pay attention to. (Check out QMCodes.com and StickyBits.com.) 

3. Content is king! Engage your customers with rich copy & images that are updated often to keep them coming back for more.  

4. Traditional outbound marketing (print ads and mailers) is going the way of the dinosaur. The future is inbound marketing and pulling consumers into your brand via search engines, social media and blogs.

5. Don’t fear new ideas, especially on the Web.  Your website is organic, so if something isn’t working you can easily change it. But you won’t be able to discover that one special tool that makes your site stand out if you don’t try new tactics.

There was a lot of buzz this year at SXSWi about HTML5 and CSS3. HTML, HyperText Markup Language, has been the standard language of the Web since its beginning. Versions of HTML4 have been used since 1997, so it's been a long time since we've gotten a major update to basic web language. CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, allows developers to style elements on a web page, making pages standard and friendly for viewers. With the innovations of HTML5 and CSS3, developers can make websites faster to run, easier to develop and nicer to view.

HTML5 has several new elements for developers to use including semantic replacements for common elements on a page like headers, navigation and footer blocks. Gaining the most steam was HTML5's support for <video> and <audio> tags. When developers want video and audio to play on a website, they almost always turn to Adobe Flash Player. HTML5 could eliminate the need for Flash in some circumstances, allowing pages to perform faster and still look and interact the same way.

CSS3 has a whole host of new ways to style web pages including adding web fonts, rounded corners, shadows, shading, and much more. These attributes mean developers will be less reliant on images, decreasing the amount of time it takes for a page to load.

As is often the case in web development, cool new technologies take some time to be implemented. Currently, HTML5 and CSS3 have the support of four of the five major browsers, the exception being Internet Explorer. Expected to be released in 2011, Internet Explorer 9 will support HTML5 and CSS3, however, until large numbers of consumers upgrade to IE9 or other modern browsers, it'll be awhile before a lot of these techniques can be used.

Here's a great page for visualizing how browsers are supporting HTML5 and CSS3. You'll instantly notice how current Internet Explorer options don't measure up. 

The ongoing web font battle was again a hot topic at SXSWi. Now that there is a way to implement web fonts by using CSS3 techniques (in Firefox, Safari, Google Chrome and Opera browsers), they are gaining even more steam in the industry.

The history of fonts on the Web is a brief one. There are currently only about 10 fonts supported on the Web; every website in the world with any HTML content is using at least one of them. So why do you see other fonts when browsing the Internet? To make websites more interesting, designers and developers put text in images or Flash, which can support any font imaginable. But, among the many drawbacks, text found in images/Flash isn’t searchable, selectable or scalable (an increasingly important factor with the emergence of mobile browsing).

You may be wondering why more fonts still aren’t commonplace online. The real crux is finding a way for font designers to sell their fonts, while preventing site visitors from downloading them illegally. If agreed on by the major browsers, it appears the solution is the WOFF format: developers will be able to purchase and use fonts on the Web, but the end user won’t be able to download them.

Using web fonts would be the beginning of a whole new world in browsing for web designers and site visitors alike. With the implementation of CSS3, we hope to see a standard font format that will make web fonts an active part of the online experience.