Kristina Halvorson is an American content strategist who defined and popularized content strategy as a professional discipline, establishing it as the practice of planning, creating, delivering, and governing useful, usable content.
Core ideas
- Content strategy as governance: Halvorson argued that organizations’ content problems aren’t writing problems — they’re governance problems. Content accumulates without ownership, goes stale without review cycles, and contradicts itself across channels. Content strategy addresses this by asking who owns content, when it gets updated, and what gets retired [@halvorson2012].
- Substance and workflow: content strategy has two dimensions — substance (what content says, its messaging and structure) and workflow (how content gets planned, created, maintained, and measured). Most organizations focus on substance and ignore workflow, which is why content degrades over time.
- Content before design: Halvorson challenged the common practice of designing interfaces with placeholder text, then filling in “real content” later. Content decisions (what to say, how to structure it, what to prioritize) must precede or accompany design decisions, not follow them.
Notable works
- Content Strategy for the Web (2009; 2nd ed. 2012, with Melissa Rach)
- Founded Brain Traffic, the first content strategy consultancy
- Founded Confab, the content strategy conference
Related
- content strategy — the discipline Halvorson defined
- style guide — style guides are a content strategy tool
- information architecture — content strategy and IA are complementary: IA structures content spatially, content strategy manages it temporally
- Janice Redish — Halvorson’s work extends Redish’s usability-first approach to web content from individual pages to organizational content systems