A while back, I blogged about how content is supposed to be king (or queen) in the website development process but often gets relegated to last place in the scramble for resources and time.
I finished by noting how Webstruxure’s Sketch can help with this process, by ensuring that clients get on with creating content earlier in the web development cycle, with content being created in parallel with the creation and approval of the site structure, rather being left to till last. That’s crucial, because it’s often not until they create the website content that clients realise the proposed site structure won’t actually meet their needs.
I stand by what I said then, but discussions with web designers have made it clear that it is almost always difficult to get clients to provide content. Even when the site has been designed and built, and the only thing to be done is add the content, delays and reworking are common.
Why is it so hard for clients to provide content? After all, clients – especially in a government town like Wellington – spend much of their working lives creating complex documents, so it’s not as though they are unused to working with words.
But writing for the web is different. It requires the ability to spell out key points in simple language and put them up front on the page, and it requires the ability to conceptualise content as part of a hyperlinked matrix rather than a linear document.
Those are specialised skills. The people who specialise in them are called web copywriters. They’re experienced at providing content for not just the main text of web pages, but also all the other types of web content: metadata, quick links, ads in the right-hand column.
Naturally, however, web copywriters charge fees commensurate with their skills. In keeping with content’s generally low status, budgets for smaller sites rarely stretch to employing them.
There are books like Rachel McAlpine’s Web Word Wizardry that teach clients how to write content. There are courses that do likewise. But unless content is accorded its necessary level of importance, the books won’t be bought and the content won’t be paid for.
To help deal with this dilemma, we’re looking at ways in which Sketch can help users to improve the quality of their content. A software tool – at least, an affordable tool – can’t do all that’s needed in this area, but it’s possible we can find ways to help clients write content which is clear, concise, focused and readable. This isn’t easy, and it may not be in the first commercial release, but we’re determined to do what we can to make sure that content can wear its rightful crown.
Tags: content, copywriters, copywriting, Sketch, web content, web development