Who takes care of the content?
Mike Duffy from The Winery Website Report wrote a nice little blog post this past week titled 'Thinking of Redesigning Your Winery Website?' where he links to a good article on 'Who takes care of the content'.
If you're planning a website the content plays a key role. So does photography (if you don't have a great photo next to your content, most people will just skip over the text). Website design, typography, 'call to action' phrases, button color, etc all play key roles.
At Vin|65 we have a set process we take our clients through:
- Discovery Process: we determine the goals of your website, setup bench marks to measure against, etc.
- Functional Requirements: we look at your current site, what your competitors are doing, determine the feature list, etc.
- Wireframes and Site Map: here we spend time deciding where the key elements need to appear, how much priority they should have, content needed, etc.
- Design Concepts: this is the fun part (and where to many web designers start)
- Etc…
People's personalities differ - some of our clients are really creative and love design, some of our clients are competitive and are really focused on the 'call to action' phrases. We do have some methodical clients that spend an incredible amount of time on content (we really have a client like this right now).
People can fall into a trap and choose a specific area on their site where they really want to focus, such as the creative, or the widgets, or at neat little Web 2.0 button, etc and because their personality type isn't attracted to other elements such as the content, they skip over those elements. (I'm guilty of this – I'm a competitive person, and I typically just skim text – I have to remember there are methodical people that really read all the text, and there are humanistic type of people that really like people pictures and testimonials, etc)
It's our job as web designers and developers to help balance our client and come up with great design, great content, and ultimately a great website.
Thoughts?