The best content strategy resources

Content strategy blogs

Sources of regular content strategy sustenance and wisdom in blog form.

If you use Notion, its web clipper is great for saving articles for reading later. We also subscribe to RSS feeds of our favourite blogs in a #reading Slack channel. Because we’re keen like that.

Brain Traffic

The Brain Traffic team really know their onions. Come for the unmatched content strategy insights, stay for the beautiful illustrations.

Content Design London

Sarah Winters (who, as Sarah Richards, championed content design at GOV.UK) and her team write about content design, accessibility and, lately, level-headed things on AI and governance. They’re especially good on the UK public and charity sectors.

Content Science Review

Colleen Jones’s online magazine covers content strategy, content operations and AI, and backs most of what it says with research of its own.

Content insights

Hilary Marsh is an experienced digital strategist, and her articles on changing how whole organisations do digital are super handy if you’re putting your mind to organisation-wide strategy.

A List Apart

This started life as a mailing list in 1997 and has been a leading voice on web standards and practice ever since. New articles come along less often than they used to, but the archive runs from trans-inclusive web design to digital democracy and rewards a long browse.

Scriptorium

Scriptorium specialise in the more technical end of the content strategy rainbow, such as structured content (content broken into labelled, reusable chunks, often in XML). They post most weeks, increasingly about what AI means for all of it, and are especially good at sharing their owl-wisdom on content’s return on investment.

Content strategy books

Longer reads, with actual pages. Since A Book Apart stopped publishing, several of its authors have made their books free to read online, and we’ve said so where they have.

The Elements of Content Strategy, Erin Kissane

In this neat little guide, Erin explores the roots of content strategy and demonstrates how to do it well with wit and insight. The whole book is free to read online.

Content Strategy for the Web, Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach

Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach’s seminal book is full of great stuff guaranteed to make anyone who works with content smile, nod and exclaim out loud.

Content Everywhere, Sara Wachter-Boettcher

Sara walks you through how to make future-ready, flexible, reusable, manageable content that will be meaningful in all sorts of contexts.

Content Strategy at Work, Margot Bloomstein

Case studies, real-world examples and practical approaches you can adopt, no matter what your role is on the content team.

Trustworthy, Margot Bloomstein

Margot’s second book looks at how organisations can win back trust in a sceptical age, through a consistent voice, the right amount of content and a willingness to be vulnerable.

Clout, Colleen Jones

A useful approach to assessing content qualitatively as well as quantitatively, using principles of rhetoric and psychology. Colleen has since grown it into The Content Advantage, whose third edition brings the whole approach into the age of AI.

Content Strategy Toolkit, Meghan Casey

From audit to analysis, strategy to implementation, occasional Contentious associate Meghan Casey’s toolkit gives you everything you need to solve all your messy content problems. The second edition came out in 2023.

Content Design, Sarah Winters and Rachel Edwards

Sarah’s first book set out the content design method, starting from what users need rather than what organisations want to say. This second edition, written with Rachel Edwards, adds new case studies and a chapter on mapping the whole route someone takes through a service.

Cultivating Content Design, Beth Dunn

Beth’s short, practical book is about building a content design practice and helping it grow inside an organisation, and she’s made it free to read online.

Content Strategy for Mobile, Karen McGrane

Karen will teach you everything you need to know to get your content onto screens of various shapes and sizes, strategically. Karen has made the whole book free to read online, and her talk Content in a Zombie Apocalypse covers much of the same ground, with added undead.

Nicely Said, Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee

Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee write beautifully about how to write beautifully. A useful guide to being clear and concise, and a joy to read.

Designing Connected Content, Mike Atherton and Carrie Hane

Design should start with words, not pixels, and content these days needs to be structured for use across many platforms and devices at once.

Just Enough Research, Erika Hall

Good content needs good research. Learn how to do just the right amount with Erika’s excellent book, now in its second edition and published by her own Mule Books.

Strategic Content Design, Erica Jorgensen

Erica shows how to research and test content, and then how to show the people who fund your team what difference it made.

Strategic Writing for UX, Torrey Podmajersky

A practical guide to writing for interfaces and building a voice that holds up across a whole product. The 2025 second edition adds a chapter on content for experiences built on large language models.

Managing Chaos, Lisa Welchman

Getting digital right in organisations is painfully hard. Lisa charts a way to manage people, content and technology without being buffeted by political infighting.

Content Operations from Start to Scale, edited by Carlos Evia

Practitioners from across the field on running content operations, from the first workflow to the whole enterprise. It’s open access, so you can download it for nothing.

Why you need a content team and how to build one, Rachel McConnell

You can’t have good content without good content people to create it and look after it. Rachel McConnell has lots of convincing arguments up her sleeve, and her later Leading Content Design is for anyone running a content design team.

Considerate Content, Rebekah Barry

Accessibility and inclusion go well beyond a compliance checklist. Rebekah combines practical guidance on clear language, structure and media with chapters on writing for people with specific conditions, from aphasia to depression, which makes it essential reading for health and care charities.

Accessibility for Everyone, Laura Kalbag

A clear, practical introduction to making websites that work for everyone, disabled people included, and to why it matters. Laura has made the whole book free on the web.

Design for Real Life, Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher

What happens when people use what you’ve made at the worst moments of their lives, and how to design for them with compassion. It’s essential reading for any charity whose users may arrive in a crisis, and it’s free to read online.

Everyday Information Architecture, Lisa Maria Marquis

Structuring and organising content is really hard. Lisa Maria Marquis’s book is brilliantly accessible.

The Web Project Guide

Corey Vilhauer and Deane Barker created this brilliant guide as an “emergent book experience”. It takes you through building a website from the first spark to launch and beyond, and it’s all free to read.

Content guidance and standards

Some of the best writing about content is published free by the organisations that have to get it right for everyone.

GOV.UK content and publishing guidance

The Government Digital Service brought its style guide, content design guidance and publishing advice together on one site in June 2026. It remains the benchmark for plain, user-centred public content, and its A to Z has settled more office arguments than we’d care to count.

NHS digital service manual

The NHS content guide is excellent on health literacy, inclusive language and writing about difficult subjects with care, and it’s kept properly up to date.

Charity Digital Code of Practice

A framework for charities on leadership, strategy, skills, risk and more, refreshed in 2025 with a new principle on data, AI running through every section and separate versions for small and large charities. Handy when content needs a seat at the strategy table.

Web Sustainability Guidelines

The W3C’s guidelines for lighter, less wasteful websites, content included. They’re still a draft, but they already make a good checklist for anyone who wants to publish less and publish better.

Content strategy podcasts

A couple of our favourite shows no longer release new episodes regularly, but their back catalogues still repay a listen.

The Content Strategy Podcast

Across 69 episodes, Kristina Halvorson talked to all sorts of interesting people about their content strategy work, from content design and AI to measuring whether content is doing its job.

Content Strategy Insights

Larry Swanson has interviewed content strategists from around the world in more than 200 episodes, on everything from conversational journalism to finding your brand voice. The show is now called Digital Practice Insights, and new episodes arrive only occasionally as Larry concentrates on knowledge graphs.

Content Operations

Sarah O’Keefe and the Scriptorium team talk structured content, content operations and AI, with more than 200 episodes so far and new ones still coming.

Content Rookie

Nicole Michaelis talks to guests about UX writing, content design, content marketing and copywriting, in friendly conversations that suit anyone early in a content career as much as old hands.

Content strategy communities

The content strategy community is great. There are lots of friendly, intelligent people out there who have a heartfelt belief in what they do and are happy to share their ideas and experience.

Content + UX

A brilliant, friendly Slack community of more than 14,000 people, Content + UX is full of proponents of and experts in content strategy and user experience design.

The Content Strategy community

Hilary Marsh’s more strategy-focused community is a paid membership space on Mighty Networks, with discussions on audits, governance, analytics and jobs.

CharityComms

The membership body for UK charity communicators runs events, networks and a growing collection of resources on AI. If you work on content in a charity, it’s your professional home.

Working In Content

A careers hub for content designers, with a job board, a weekly newsletter, a Slack group of more than 3,500 people and its own conference, Growing In Content.

Button

Brain Traffic’s online conference for content designers and strategists runs every September, with free events through the rest of the year. For plenty of us it filled the gap Confab left when it ended in 2023.

Content Strategy Facebook group

A long-running Facebook group for practising content strategists, and another good place to ask questions.

Bluesky

Twitter/X was long the social network hangout of choice for many content strategists. These days plenty of them are on Bluesky, and the content strategy starter packs are a quick way to find them (Iain Broome’s Content Designers pack is a good place to begin).

Other sources of resources

Content strategy people are very good at sharing. These are a few of our favourite lists.

The Alphabet of Content Strategy, Jess Vice

This A–Z of all things content strategy is packed full of good links to useful, interesting resources.

The Epic List of Content Strategy Resources, Jonathon Colman

Jonathon’s enormous list of content strategy and content design resources was last updated in 2021, so a few of its links have wandered off, but nothing else comes close for sheer range.

UX Content Collective resources

A library of hundreds of articles, tools and talks, kept up to date and filterable by topic, from content strategy to AI.

Anything else?

What did we miss? Let us know what your favourite resources are and we’ll consider them for inclusion.