Posts Tagged ‘content’

Web Designers and Their Clients: Which Is To Be Master?

Tuesday, August 19th, 2008

In Alice in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty, sitting precariously on his wall, tells Alice, who is standing and peering up at him,

“The question is which is to be master – - that’s all.”

Web designers and their clients are a bit like Alice and Humpty Dumpty. The question often comes down to “which is to be master”: who calls the shots, and who makes the rules?

Ultimately, it’s the client who’s master. After all, the client pays the bills, and has the final say on what the site will look like. But designers often chafe under this yoke. When the client shows up at the design company’s office, it’s like the enemy is at the gate.

Since we’re developing Sketch, which is designed to speed up the process of creating the structure of a site and populating it with content, it isn’t really appropriate for Webstruxure to take sides in this conflict. But we know what it’s like for web designers, trying to cope with content being delivered late if at all, last-minute demands for major changes to site structure, and naïve requests for visual design changes: can we put the Chief Executive’s photo on the home page, top left? Wouldn’t the whole site look better if the colours were green and red?

So we think it’s important that designers lay down some clear groundrules early in the design process. Clients need to be told when it is the right time to have input, and when it is the right time to let the designer go off and work in peace. If the designer lays out a clear process with clear checkpoints to the client early in the process, it’s more likely that the designer will be left to do the parts that they can do best.

One of the big advantages of Sketch is that it lets the designer specify what aspects of the site the client can work on – whether it’s adding content only, or being able to change both structure and content. The client is provided with an easy way to get on with their part of the process, and is therefore less likely to pester the designer. Sketch gets clients involved in the website creation process – but it gets them involved in the right aspects of that process, not the wrong ones.

Sketch is like a sturdy wooden box. Place it next to that wall in Wonderland, and Humpty Dumpty can meet Alice half-way. He can climb down without a painful fall, and she can communicate with him without getting, or being, a pain in the neck.

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Posted in Products, Sketch, web development | 2 Comments »

The Secret to Smooth Project Delivery

Friday, June 27th, 2008

Kate Rutter recently published an interview with Kristina Halvorson, who in the previous month had spoken at Adaptive Path‘s Queens of Content event.

Halvorson is clear about the consequences of not focusing on content early in web project planning:

“Oh, where do I begin. Delayed start to the writing process, since Web content documentation needs to be agreed-upon, standardized, and built out. More delays, because suddenly gathering up the content becomes a messy, time-consuming, overwhelming task. Dozens of unplanned revisions as more and more content keeps being requested or remembered. Incredible, unavoidable scope creep. Tensions and frustrations because no one has the time (or the power) to slow down and make sure everything is consistent, relevant, clear. And, of course, the end result of crappy content that none of your customers care about.”

Delayed start…more delays…mess…overwhelming task…unplanned revisions…unavoidable scope creep…tensions…frustrations…crappy content…missed customers.

This is not a happy picture.

Our own research backs this up. Our data shows that ninety-five percent of web design companies suffer from late content delivery and late change requests.

Why is this? They can’t communicate the importance of content effectively. And they can’t collaborate with the client to ensure it’s produced early in the process. Therefore, it doesn’t influence the website architecture until too late.

What’s needed, then, is a way for designers and clients to rapidly begin drafting the website so that the importance of content is clear, and so that the client feels able to deliver it effectively. This solution needs to be flexible, fast and very responsive to changes – a site-before-the-site.

Sketch alpha logo

That’s why we’re making Sketch.

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Content: The Spectre at the Feast?

Friday, March 21st, 2008

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.

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Content: The Once and Future King?

Saturday, January 12th, 2008

We all know that content is supposed to be king (or queen, if you prefer). Users may be impressed with the fancy graphics and the Flash animations the first time they visit your site, but it’s content and usability that will keep them coming back.

Yet it’s all too common in the web development process for content to be treated as the scullery boy rather than the king. Lots of people want to talk about the design and argue the toss over what size the logo should be, the precise shade of green to use in the footer, and whose photo goes on the “About Us” page. Other people realise how crucial navigation is, and are prepared to sit down with wireframes and card sorts until the site structure is sorted out.

But as for content … all too often, about two weeks before the site is due to go live, some poor schlub from the client company is told to sit down and deal with the content. If the site is new, they’ll be handed a long word processor document and told to cut it up into web pages. If the site’s a redesign, their task is even simpler: copy the content of the old site and paste it into the corresponding pages on the new site.

Problem solved, right? Now everyone else can forget about content and concentrate on important things, like ordering the canapés for the site launch party. They’ll even let the content person attend the launch, provided he or she stands at the back and doesn’t say anything.

Unfortunately, no. Major flaws in a site structure may not be revealed until someone sits down to flesh out the structures with content. But when the site launch date is staring everyone in the face, no-one wants to hear that the structure doesn’t work. “It’s only content,” someone will mutter. “What’s really important is that senior management agrees on the home page colour scheme.”

So here’s an idea: develop the content along with the structure, so that one informs the other. Use a tool that helps the designer and the client work collaboratively. Use a tool that can turn your online prototype into a basic working site at the click of a button (and the payment of a small amount of money).

Use Sketch, in other words. And it’s coming soon.

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Posted in Products, Sketch, web development | No Comments »

We’ve Created a Tool That Can Do Everything*

Thursday, December 6th, 2007

Here at Webstruxure, we’re pushing the boundaries of technology pretty much on a daily basis – except for Fridays, when we go out for lunch instead. But we think we might have excelled ourselves this time. We’ve created a tool called Sketch. It’s still very much in the prototype phase, but it seems to be able to do pretty much everything.

The idea is simple enough. Sketch lets you build the navigation for a web site, browse and modify the site structure you’ve created, and enter or copy content into the pages you’ve created via a simple text editor.** You can send a permalink that lets other people access this online version of your site.

And it is all online – there’s no installation required, and you can use Sketch for site design and content creation whether the site will run on ASP .NET, Linux, or something else again.

Sketch is great for website designers. Just as no battle plan survives contact with the enemy, so no site design survives contact with the client – especially when the client starts trying to fit their content into the design you’ve created.

Sketch can end the trench warfare by allowing designer and client to develop the site together. The client can load content into the prototype design, and if the design doesn’t seem to be working, designer and client can collaborate on changing the structure till it does. What’s more, Sketch can act as an online wire-framing tool.

But its potential benefits don’t stop there. We think it might have a role in the creation of co-authored documents – the sort of document that ten people work on, each contributing a small part of the whole. That would avoid wrestling with Word, at least until the final formatting of the document is underway.

There are some things Sketch is not. It’s not a content management system. It’s not a page design tool – the “look and feel” design still needs to be done elsewhere. But it is a mighty fine tool, and it’s remarkably flexible.

We’re not yet claiming Sketch will combat global warming, end hunger and oppression, or ensure the All Blacks win the 2011 Rugby World Cup – but we’ll let you know once we’ve done a bit more testing.

* Precise definition of “everything” may vary from that commonly understood.

** I say “simple”, but it can cope with pretty sophisticated formatting – we tried loading the entire Wikipedia entry on the USA into Sketch as an experiment, and we were amazed how well the formatting was preserved.

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Posted in Products, Sketch | 1 Comment »