Andy Gillette

I don’t particularly like ‘content.’

I mean, on the one hand, I love content.  We all do.  It’s what makes a website more than just a CSS file.  But I don’t want to be in the business of creating content for my clients, unless they’ve hired me specifically to write for them, in which case I don’t particularly want to be in the business of designing for them.

I push Wordpress pretty hard when I take on new web projects for this exact reason.  I want to be able to design something that will look great all the time, no matter what the client decides to do with the site when I’m gone.  It’s kind of how the web works.  Everything is a “blog” in one way or another.  There are no static websites left, or at least, not many.  And nobody is in the mood, especially now, to pay someone an hourly rate, or a monthly retainer to be a “webmaster.”  And who could blame them?  It’s the nature of technology that as it becomes more ubiquitous it becomes easier to use and more multi-talented (or maybe it’s the other way around – it becomes more ubiquitous because it’s easier to use, etc.).

HTML has been around for 20 years at this point.  It’s extraordinarily well-understood, and it’s difficult for anyone to graduate high school in America, let alone college, without getting at least some rudimentary introduction to web development.  This may leave something to be desired, but the point is that people are a lot more comfortable running their own websites than ever before.  And I, for one, think this is awesome.

I started working with CMS’s as a selling point.  It’s easier on everyone if the client maintains some level of control over the site.  It allows the client to have a fresh site every day, if they want.  At the very least it means that their content can always be up-to-date.  It also means that I don’t have to confine myself to one industry, or one type of client.  I don’t necessarily need to know anything about what a company or a person does to be able to make a site that works well for them.  Good design means I need to have an idea of who they are targeting and what they want to get out of it, but I don’t need to be an expert in their field.  They can handle that part.

And it saves a lot of time and headaches.  If you’ve ever worked in a big company, you understand how decision by committee works.  It’s extremely frustrating as a designer, but that process is just as ruthless on content.  If a client is paying me to put the words on their website, we’ve inadvertently opened up a huge can of worms.

I recently helped out a friend of mine with a site for a college, a medical school, actually.  The short version is: he hired an off-shore team to develop his design and what he got back was kind of a mess.  In the days and weeks following when he showed them the beta site that his team had developed and when I helped him clean it up so it matched his initial designs, the client came up with massive amounts of content changes.  All of these doctors at the school had competing ideas about what should go where and whose name goes in what order on such-and-such pages.  Unfortunately, this site was not built to be particularly smart or dynamic.  If it was we could easily have softened the blow by pointing out that every department could just have a TA or whoever update the pages as they saw fit.  Instead, we ended up going back and forth for another month.   It was a lot of ‘ctrl+f’ in these ridiculously verbose PHP files (half of which were in spanish).  I will never do that again.

So if you are a web designer and you haven’t caught up yet, go read this article and learn to love Wordpress.  You know what they say: once you go dynamic, you never go back.