Hi, I'm TJ Gunther.
My two favorite things are discovery and problem solving.
I love when you turn a corner to find something new, walk outside the airport in a new city and soak in the signs, and when you first hear a new song you know you'll be listening to another 100 times.
I seek out the satisfaction of watching a solution click into place, the gasp as I realize the incoming twist in a movie, or the early stages of fact-finding when you just need to define the edges of a rather complicated issue. In my career as a content strategist, I seek to understand my clients, discover their inner workings, and uncover how we can solve their problems with thoughtful architecture, structured content, and strategic writing. I love hard questions, and I enjoy mining the analytics and user research to provide satisfying answers.
I want to know at least a little bit about everything, because knowledge allows me to connect different ideas and unlock novel ways to view problems. It also will hopefully help me get on Jeopardy one day. I'm also an inherent listener, comfortable taking in information and taking a minute to synthesize it before moving forward in a conversation.
What I do
I'm a systems thinker trying to reflect the real-world properties of organizations in their digital presences. Over 14 years of consulting at Digital Wave, I've never settled into one silo. I love to bridge content, design, and technical work, and explore the interplay between them to create novel online experiences. I use my knowledge of analytics and research to understand user behavior, identify pain points, and develop solutions that solve the actual problem.
Platforms people can actually use
I'm proficient in multiple CMSs, including Drupal, Wordpress, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), Sitecore, Hannon-Hill Cascade, and more. I love to understand new systems and the possibilities they open up. Each has its own approach to content and management that requires structures to be different and adapt.
I worked closely with a designer and developer to design and implement a custom Drupal platform tailored toward higher ed institutions with smaller budgets. As the content lead, I created copy that matched their language, making it easy to work in the CMS, and provided content strategy guidelines for extending their voice and adapting it to work within the new framework.
I onboarded each client, conducted discovery, redesigned their sitemap, and presented a new strategy. I gave them training and consulted with them through the life of their project and afterwards as questions and new requests came up. When these teams ran into issues using the platform, I fielded the questions, tracked the changes, and worked with a developer to implement updates to make the experience better for content editors. I built out and wrote the system's documentation, using the platform as an example of best practices for every page type and component.
What's next
I am exploring headless CMS implementations. I am introducing AI tools to help manage content in a way that retains the author's humanity and benefits people, not just machines. My understanding of AEO and GEO is evolving, taking past SEO recommendations and updating them to meet our current times.
Contact me
I love to speak on content, providing advice and opinions about how to approach problems.