What happens today?
Delivering and maintaining large web sites is hard. It requires the business team to communicate what they want and for the technology team to deliver what they need. The two groups are known for not getting on. For a web project to succeed, they must eat from the same table, talk the same language and reach consensus. Communication is the key differentiator between success and failure here. It’s essential that when someone in the business says product that a developer not only understands what a product is but can implement it. Now, business and technology folks don’t share the same view of the world (which is a plus). However, not enough effort is invested to align these two views during the project(which is a minus). Think about it. The business is entrusting their most valuable assets, their content, to software developers that may or may not get it! We don’t have to live with great content divide.
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Site Map
What is a site map? Its a helicopter view of a web site with all the pages arranged in a easy to view and/or accessible manner. The best site maps fit onto a single page. For the more complex sites out there, the ability to drill down into specific areas of the site but keeping to the one page rule provides an alternative site navigation scheme.
In the majority of design-led projects, the site map is presented in graphical form that provides an essential first look at the structure/grouping of pages within a web site. The problem I have with these diagrams is that they are typically presented along with the completed designs. The finished article. However, for me they are the critical starting point for the journey to the centre of the content hierarchy.
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Say you’ve been asked to buy a suit for someone you’ve never met. What do you do first?
- Buy the suit.
- Meet & Measure them.
For design-led projects, we’re buying that suit first. By damn, one way or another that content will well fit into that design and look good! Of course I’m exaggerating a little here. But if have been in a project where the content is delivered at the end and simply doesn’t fit, you never want to go there again.
Now call me odd, but wouldn’t life be that little bit easier if we sized up the content first and then designed the site to fit it. Measure, then fit. I dream of projects where we all work together to determine what information a site needs upfront, organise it, think of ways to be navigate it and then and only then do we create the designs to satisfy those requirements. What typically happens is something that lies between these to extremes depending on when I get involved.
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Whenever I start out on a new project, I aim to deliver demonstrably value back to the customer. I try to make an immediate change for better. After all, that’s what they pay me for. For content-oriented projects, a large part of that is knowing what information the customer thinks is important to them. Content modelling is key here.
If content has value, then take the necessary steps to manage it:
- Understand it.
- Define it.
- Measure it.
- Manage it.
Content modelling is a journey where those on the project strive to get consensus on ‘the what’ of information. The deliverable is a content model. However, the real value is in doing content modelling. Get a better understanding of what information you have and need, inspect and adapt it, define it in business terms and measure it in a way that your organisation can seek to continually improvement their business processes. Only then are you in a position to attempt to manage it.
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For any content managed web site, content types are its first class citizens. Content types describe the chunks of information that companies depend upon to conduct their business. Things like events, news, products, journals, flights, holidays, adverts, campaigns and call to actions. All possible content types. Yet, when talk to business folks about content types, 9 times out of 10, you may as well be speaking klingon. And right there is the communication gap. So is it any wonder, when you entrust third parties such as design agencies, solution providers, and vendors with the task of dissecting your business into manageable information chunks, that things don’t go according to plan.
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