Context is the atmosphere or environment in which you understand or experience something. It's the total picture that informs each piece of the picture. When it comes to your Web site, the context that you create through various choices you make regarding navigation, text, and other factors will affect the message you deliver and how effectively it will be understood by your audience. Consider how out of place hip-hop slang would seem on a Web site that has a conservative look (or vice-versa), and you'll get the picture about context.

On any Web site, creating context for experience includes issues of usability. It includes how the navigation, look and feel, download times, text, art, transaction system, community interaction, and other components of the site hang together and affect each other. The most skilled content strategists and developers consider both how content affects the context and how context affects the content. For that reason, it is sometimes said that if content is king, usability is queen. And that, friends, means that content people think deeply about usability. Usability people think about content, too.