Clients tend to be a diverse lot. Often times new clients assume the project will begin, a meeting or two will ensue and our team will retire to our nerdery to get down to work and deliver an outstanding project… end of story. Other than the ‘outstanding project’ part, what happens in reality is quite a different story.
When it comes to developing content, many clients are more than a little surprised at the work required on their end, and there are three scenarios that usually develop:
- Content needs to be ported from an existing solution (web site, online application, etc.) to the new one. This can be as easy as porting information from a database, or as labour intensive as manually copying everything into an interstitial document or into the new solution itself.
- Content exists, but it needs to be re-worked to deliver a better user experience.
- No content exists and everything must be developed from scratch.
Though some clients relish the opportunity to get their hands dirty and help the project move along, the vast majority feel that their time is much better spend doing whatever it is they do best (and rightly so, for the most part). So what happens now? Where does the axe fall?
In each of these scenarios clients must either undertake the endeavor of amassing/re-working/developing the content themselves, or contract someone to organize it for them. Depending on the path the client chooses, they may either need to commit a fair amount of time to the process, a fair amount of money to the process, or potentially both.
I find many people in many professions have a saying that they consistently fall back on:
The fast, good, and cheap conundrum
There are three qualities to any project: Good, Fast, & Cheap. You can choose any two, but you can not have a third one. If you want your project to be Fast and Good, it won’t be Cheap. If you would prefer Cheap and Good, it can’t be done Fast. If you have a hankering for Fast and Cheap, it’s not going to be Good.
Unfortunately this saying manages to hold true in this situation as well. Though we will often do what we can to educate the client as to how online content should be developed, it is rarely what we are contracted to do. The unfortunate result of this is that the proverbial buck ends up stopping right at the doorstep of the client, much to their chagrin.
During the initial phases of our project we do our best to proactively deal with any content issues that arise by first analyzing existing content during our Visualization phase and then either allocate funds towards ‘dealing’ with the content (if the budget allows), or determine alternate options for taking care of the content migration/problems – whether that is looking for additional budget dollars and sourcing copywriters, or outlining what steps the client will need to take to organize the content themselves.
As a client, should you decide to undertake the venture of content on your own, may I suggest some light reading (from one of my favorite sites):
October 5th, 2006 at 12:08 pm
D. Keith Robinson of Blue Flavour goes into much more detail on the subject and outlines some strategies you can use when approaching content management. A great read on Think Vitamin.