The item on content strategy is interesting and I think spot on. I'm just completing a project with a company that wants to rejig their content strategy - and managing an external agency who are building a new Drupal-based site.
I rather mucked up their nice ganntt chart by insisting that content entry was bought way forward, before the site design was signed off. "Lets the get the content types defined and get some real content in there - give me any kind of cobbled together basic back-end you can" then we can see how the designs work with real content.
It actually worked very well - and avoided the death march at the end of the process where you have to port all the old content into the new system at the last moment.
We've started doing something similar. We build a lot of sites upon WordPress and upload a basic version of the twentyeleven theme (with a few base plugins) and start getting content populated ASAP, this gives the designers a good base to start from and also highlights potential content-styling before they're a problem rather than the day before go-live.
Also, he uses low-contrast grey text on a white background (might be better readable on a better screen, but on my shitty laptop it makes things harder to read than necessary) + the navigation links on top have no text at all on them (this might be intentional, due to his server having problems).
I, for one, like my advices best from people with at least basic skills in the area. Or from people who at least try to adopt the things they say/just learned/want to pass on.
The link to MailChimp's "Voice and Tone" style guide was an interesting find. I wonder who their target audience for that site is? New hires? http://voiceandtone.com/
I could see many UGC sites needing something like this as a boilerplate starting point before creating content (or even customer service reps before engaging users). But even if this was simply a publicized internal document, I really like it.
I rather mucked up their nice ganntt chart by insisting that content entry was bought way forward, before the site design was signed off. "Lets the get the content types defined and get some real content in there - give me any kind of cobbled together basic back-end you can" then we can see how the designs work with real content.
It actually worked very well - and avoided the death march at the end of the process where you have to port all the old content into the new system at the last moment.