November 27th 2008 / learned, shared
We’re building web-sites wrong
I view a lot of web-sites everyday. I build a lot of web-sites every year and I can safely say we’re all doing it wrong, including me.
We are building web-sites with too much emphasis on visually pleasing ourselves, our clients and the potential surfer/user(s). We are ignoring content almost entirely.
There are an enormous pile of reasons (read: excuses) for this crazy workflow. We are all guilty of at least one or more at any given time. The copy/content is not available at the time of the design phase, no one knows what the content will be, you started strong got bored and just towed the line to get it off your calendar resulting in boring content placement and design, etc… and so on.
We should be solving the problem that is the presentation of content, not the placement of content within the presentation.
Wireframes, let alone design comprehensive dummies should not begin without a full content document. And I’m not talking about a vague notion of content and where it might go. I’m talking about a document that outlines final copy and contextual images and their importance.
I’m talking about examples of typical blog/news posts. I’m talking about a document that says we want this form, with this functionality, and this is what will happen if the form is filled in wrong, and here’s what happens when it is good to go, and here’s what happens after the submission, etc… and so on.
We need to see the problem in it’s entirety prior to trying to solve it. We cannot do our jobs to the best of our ability when we don’t know the problem we are solving.
Let’s stop spending so much time trying to please clients & users visually in the beginning and start figuring out how to please clients & users long term and with lasting solutions that are at once visually stunning and attentive to the needs and flow of the content.
Web-sites are content.
“We’re building web-sites wrong” was written by James Mathias on November 27th 2008
A writer, artist and outlaw. Living, working and playing in Tennessee. James writes TAO in a vain effort to teach, learn and share with the industry he loves.
feedback, comments & opinions
19 comments
As an information architect I deal with this issue on an almost daily basis.
Me: I need to know the content for these pages before I can wireframe them.
Account Exec: We can figure out the content after we know how much room there is in the wireframes.
Me: The wireframes should reflect the space needed for the content!
And on and on and on. Argh.
Nailed it.
You say not having content is an excuse but you know how it works… About 70-80% of the sites I’ve ever built for other people have been by this “Design first, content later” orientated approach. Not by choice, but by how things happen.
You might call it an excuse but when the clients themselves don’t know what they’re putting on a site, I think the attention we do manage to exert on content is pretty amazing. Psychic, almost.
They might know what they want their site to achieve. They might agree with our suggestions for what the content may or may not be
The other side of my argument is that when clients *do* manage to get some semi-final copy to you before the design process starts, it’s invariably utter nonsense. The person writing said content has no idea where it’s going and how it relates to the rest of the pages. They barely know how to work Hotmail, let alone how sites are structured. Or that scans of photographs of photocopies won’t look great when uploaded onto a website. The first way around, at least the content makes sense. This way, most of it needs hefty rewriting.
But I don’t understand why you think design has to be a one-off process. My experience has taught me (primarily through the first method) that it goes:
- consult with client to generate a site map and intended features
- build wireframes
- mock designs
- client interference
- build
- back to design for things that couldn’t be built or didn’t work
- content
- back to design for more QA
Building websites is and *should be* an iterative process. We, as humans never get anything correct the first time around. Projects change and if you get stuck in a “We’ve got to get this perfect first time around” rut, you’re never going to be happy.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you. In a perfect world, the people providing content would knows how things work and they manage to get you perfect assets first time off. That would make design and build so much easier, I agree…
… But it never happens.
Third para should read:
They might know what they want their site to achieve. They might agree with our suggestions for what the content may or may not be, but when it comes around to them finally providing their legal-approved, SEO-mumbled content, it looks nothing like how it started.
Oli, you just described the problems that currently exist, and how to work around them which is what we are all already doing everyday.
Bottom line, It doesn’t work and it’s inefficient.
I’m not implying or suggesting that we design once and walk away, or that we try for perfection right off the bat.
I’m trying to open eyes that our current process is broken, and regardless of where the crack starts we’re just throwing “puddy” in it instead of finding the source and preventing it initially.
We need to band together as an industry and say look here client, what you have provided is sub par and or useless to the process. We need you to provide this and this and that.
And not continue saying; oh OK we’ll work with this and be miserable and produce sub par work to wrap around future notions.
It’s ludicrous.
What I’m saying here is we need to educate our clients, and work with them to get the final copy and content of the web-site we are going to build them prior to starting the design or build process.
It needs to be the first step not the 11th hour gathering and begging session that it currently and has been for so many years.
I’m saying we need to change our ways first and then guide our clients to changing the way they view web-site construction.
If banding together worked, we wouldn’t still have to battle against the evils of IE6.
But seriously. You can’t blame the client for their view on the problem. As far as they know, websites are built out of berries and fairy dust atop a snow-peaked mountain. We’re the professionals, not them.
It’s up to us to attempt a solution that manages to get content from clients without them breaking out into a sweat and without wasting all our time.
My first instinct is to dump a ton of technology on the problem. How about an interactive client-used site-mapping tool where they can generate pages (collaboratively with us) and enter all the content so we know what we’re dealing with..? Basically, the back-end of a simple CMS.
Ah yes, the argument nearly as old as the industry. Your right, it’s a problem. But unfortunately, the bottom line (to the client) is the big fat check they send our way for working our magic. If that magic consists of placeholders and dummytext and FPO images, well, I suppose that’s what we’ll have to do.
Don’t get me wrong. You’re argument sounds great. I’m sure everyone in the industry has voiced this at least once. But I’d also have to say it’s completely unrealistic.
Let us all follow our glorius Lord and Savior J.M. onto the glory lands that shall come. Let us build with our hands and not our finger tips; let us cast the woman into her proper roll as mother and partner, not the false content yeilding hydra she has become. Let us live free from witchcraft and Ochsner voodoo that has poisoned our youth. So on and so forth with rules that do not matter and a history no one shall ever give a fuck about.
Oli, the evils of IE 6 are not something that our community can fix. Never have been.
The problem of content before design, however is repairable, very much so. It just takes some bravery and hard work on the part of both client and developer alike. I’m not saying it’ll be easy to transition to a better workflow from the broken one, but certainly it’s possible.
Brad, unrealistic? Not so. What is unrealistic is the belief that something shouldn’t be attempted, just because everyone is mostly comfortable with the way it works and doesn’t feel like stirring things up, for fear that it will make things rough for a minute, no matter the long term improvements.
Our industry is ever-changing and a requirement of surviving is creating and managing new ways of completing the work we love. Sometimes that means reevaluating a process and making corrections to improve it, which is all I’m suggesting we do as an industry.
Matthew, Really? Come on man.
If anything i am in support of you dawg. Design beats out everything for me, by even having content you have given up on your design. Content is for old people or books.
To nip back slightly, we really aught to be doing more about IE6. There used to be a bit of semi-militant activity (user-blocking, intermediate pass-through pages, etc) but that appears to have died off.
Between every web professional you know, we have a lot of dirty little fingers in a lot dirty little pies and by pies I mean websites and by fingers I mean.. err.. fingers. Lets blow some shit up. Stop making things work perfectly for IE6. Live a little happier.
At this rate, we’re still going to have to support two of Microsoft’s decrepit and failed browsers when they launch IE8. I hope they build a kill-switch into IE8 so in 2011 when they’re pushing out IE9, they can nuke every install of IE8 like that *clicks fingers*.
Oli, I agree 100% that we shouldn’t be supporting IE 6 anymore, and if we need to for a client’s project it should require additional fees. Educating the client on why it costs more can go a long way, as well.
IE 6 is the bane of my web world, but no amount of blocking, non-support or arguing amongst ourselves about it will make it go away. It’s a matter of laziness, stubbornness, lack of awareness and good old miseducation that causes this browser to be so dominant, even now that it is practically two versions out of date.
That said, the post above is really about changing the way we work the client on building out their web-site and not the browsers we support or shouldn’t.
Whoa there! I don’t think any web developer is “mostly comfortable” with the way things are. As a matter of fact, not having content becomes more and more uncomfortable with every project. And I’m all for change, otherwise I wouldn’t be in this profession. I guess my point is that the more a client is willing to pay, the harder it is to correct their way of thinking. When someone hands you a check for six figures, you can’t exactly tell them you won’t start working until they give you a meticulous final draft of complete content. It’s not gonna happen and if we do insist on it to prove a point, they’ll take that check to someone who will gladly proceed without the pre-work.
I apologize if I offended you with my assumption. But my idea is not to collect money and then say; “Give us content before we start working on the site.”
I’m suggesting we change the process to better fit the end game. Meaning that it’s our job to help them help us. They aren’t just paying us 6 figures for some paint and boards. We are carrying them throughout the entire process, we need to educate and help them provide the things we need to produce the best site in the long term, explanation, education and open communication solves a lot of this issue.
I’d just like to amend the process to make the content more important than the visuals and even, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but, the code as well.
Right now in the most basic sense we (the industry in general) would do a project like this.
discovery > wireframes > design > code > gather/amend/finalize/add content > test > launch.
I’d like to see it become.
discovery > gather content > amend/finalize content > design > code > add content > test > launch.
Again I am sorry if my assumption about your original point offended you, it was not my intention.
As always, none taken 
Well, here I go…
I believe it’s fair to say that everyone who has posted here so far is a designer or developer or a combo of the two. And yes I know that some of you have been or still are freelancing so you have dealt with clients directly. But I would offer this…
Clients don’t know what they need to provide and cannot visualize what a site will be until it is about 80% finished. No matter how many wireframes or designs you do, they can’t get their heads around content until they see the site in beta. They aren’t being stubborn, they just can’t do it. They’re not capable unless they’ve been through this before and they are now into a gen3 or 4 website and even then they are only partially capable.
Then there is the thing that the clients deal with in their own companies. The best laid content plans often get scuttled during the process or after the launch by other factions within the company, from the janitor to the CEO. So even if we began with a perfectly complete set of content, it wouldn’t stay that way for long.
I couldn’t agree more that it would be best for the process if we could get all content up front, but the truth is this isn’t about process, it’s about people. It is beyond the capabilities of the client to provide that and even if they did, when the site got to 80% complete, they’d change their minds. Which leads me to the Paramore|Redd Website Pledge:
‘My website is a dynamic marketing tool, and as such, it will never be finished, and that’s ok.’
The very advantage of our industry over every type of traditional media and collateral production is that the projects are ever evolving. My biggest frustration with designers and developers (and I’m baring it all here) is that they get frustrated at changes when the client thinks it’s wonderful that they can make changes and not have 10,000 hard copies somewhere that need to be tossed because something happened that required a change. We sell to this advantage and then complain about it when it happens. The ONLY thing that matters in this scenario is that we manage changes and get paid for them. Period.
From the point of view of a business owner who has to compete for the business and then try to keep the business, we can’t price a project or build a relationship with the kind of content development and collection process you are describing. We don’t ever get paid for all the hours we work now. Though you contend that it would help in the end I do not believe that. I think it would give us a better project but it would not shorten the development time, and it would not strengthen the relationship, which is all I really care about.
If we wait for content, nothing will ever get built.
It’s true that web development is an iterative process. And it’s a process that includes various types of people with varying degrees of savvy, knowledge, expertise and just plain work ethic. Our job is to do the best we can with what we have and to push for better. But we can’t dig our heels in. We’d lose all our relationships and go out of business and I don’t want to do that.
Hannah, Thanks for reading and commenting, I really appreciate it. Your point of view as a business owner is invaluable and I really like hearing it from a different point of view, and even though I don’t 100% agree, I can appreciate and understand.
Overall, I think what you have said makes sense from a business standpoint, which sadly at the end of the day is all that matters.
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Timothy Gray
11/27/08 11:34 am
Preach it brother!