Jill Vacarra - Descanso Gardens Content

Photo by Jill Vacarra.

DESCANSO CONTENT RENOVATION

CHALLENGES: Insufficient information for Descanso visitors and members. Stale content that couldn't be readily updated by Descanso staff, and an impersonal institutional tone and voice.

SOLUTIONS: A complete website content overhaul with new tonality and text written to be brief, easy to read, relevant, and informative about the topics Descanso audiences care about most. Scannable content that's accessible and useful. Descanso’s storytelling highlights how the garden wants to be perceived and aligns with the garden's Master Plan.

WHAT I DID: Content strategy, Content Tonality, Copywriting, Copyediting, Editorial Workflow, and Organization of all launch content.

IN COLLABORATION WITH: Descanso Garden's Marketing team

13,000

NUMBER OF RECORDS FOR DESCANSO PLANTS IN THE GARDENS

THE TEAM. While collaborating on the UX portions of Descanso's website redsignproject with design studio KBDA, I worked directly with Descanso's marketing team on several content aspects of the project.

CULTIVATING CONTENT. I leveraged KBDA's previous brand and messaging strategy work for the content project. The content project had several components:

– Develop a welcoming tone and voice to replace an existing dry, stuffy voice.

– Document and train marketing staff on the new tone and voice and best practices for creating online content

– Set up a way to organize and track the content effort for website launch to assist content creators, the design team, and the technical development team in building the site

– Write and copyedit dozens of site pages for the website launch.

Photo by Jill Vacarra

ESTABLISHING TONE & VOICE: A tonality brief is similar to a project creative brief but digs deeper into how the brand's tone and voice play out in language. For example, if two of Descanso's brand attributes are "enchanting" and "magical" how are these ideas expressed through the content?

I developed Descanso's Tone & Voice Guide to clarify and document the tonality of the brand communications. The Guide also expands the understanding of the brand attributes established in the garden's creative brief, differentiates Descanso's tone compared to competitors, and includes examples so writers and other content creators can tailor their content to align with Descanso's updated brand.

The Tone & Voice Guide also takes into account the project personas and multiple audiences for content development (such as content targeted for expert horticulturists vs typical garden visitors).

Descanso Tonality Guide

TONALITY EXPLORATIONS. Next, I put the Tone & Voice Guide into practice. I created sample content to verify verbiage choices with the client and demonstrate how we might apply the tone across different content types. This process highlighted a single page of content with three writing style variations to refine word choice and tone further.

PAGE-LEVEL COPYWRITING. Based on the approved Tone & Voice Guide I wrote new content for about 30 of Descanso's new site pages and provided editing and copywriting for an additional 35 pages. I also conducted high-level content training for the Descanso staff so they could leverage the Tone & Voice Guide to create needed additional pages and to help wrangle the site content for launch.

GARDEN SECRETS

DELIGHT AND DISCOVERY ARE PART OF DESCANSO'S DNA. UNEXPLAINED NATURAL

ART INSTALLATIONS MAY APPEAR MYSTERIOUSLY AT DESCANSO AS IF SOME MAGIC SPRITE

SNUCK INTO THE GARDENS IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT AND CONJURED ENCHANTMENT

JUST FOR YOU. GARDEN SECRETS OFFERS LITTLE-KNOWN FACTS AND INSIDER TIDBITS ON

A HIDDEN "EASTER EGG" WEB PAGE FOUND ONLY VIA A DISCRETE LINK OR ICON ON THE WEBSITE.

EDITORIAL WORKFLOW. The "last mile" for any content project inevitably hinges on the content being organized and ready for launch. I've witnessed too many websites miss launch dates for lack of content organization.

CONTENT STORAGE. Digital tools and storage systems exist to help create and edit large quantities of digital content, including tools such as Frontitude that integrate directly with our project's design tool of choice, Figma. As a public non-profit entity, Descanso Gardens lacks the budget needed to license editorial content storage software. So we used the tools we had on hand. I organized a series of content storage folders on Descanso's Google Drive instance that included systematic nomenclature and numbering to make content easier to create and locate. With this system, content creators, editors, and the technical development team could easily generate, edit, approve, and locate content for launch.

DETAILED PAGE TABLES. I developed a master page table template in Google Docs and then created individual documents with alphanumeric names for each page on the new Descanso website. I trained the Descanso team to use these custom page tables for content creation, tracking, and revision.

The page tables were based on the approved design comps, outlining the exact structure and order of page elements. Each table cataloged page content at a granular level, including H1 and H2 headers, subheads, special content blocks, image placement, and standard text content for each new site screen.

The page tables were organized by the approved site structure including the same page names and numbers as the sitemap. The technical development team used the identical site structure as a checklist to accurately populate and style every content element on each site page in time for launch.

EDITORIAL STYLE GUIDE. To support Descanso's ongoing content maintenance efforts I documented and expanded Descanso's grammatical rules and style preferences with an Editorial Style Guide.

CONTENT PROCESS DOCS