The Waiting Game

The waiting is the worst part. I’m a doer. I feel most at ease when I am actively working towards a goal, rather than waiting for something to happen. Patience may be a virtue, but waiting is annoying as hell.

Moving Day

I’m moving in just over a week. It’s a crazy, hectic time for me and my family, but so far we’re in good shape for the move. We’ve been very proactive during this process, having started packing about a month ago. We boxed up items that were not critical to our daily lives, donated many items that were in good shape that we no longer needed and junked anything that was broken or beyond repair. Like I said, we’re in good shape. Now all we need to do…is wait.

This is the part I hate. I’ve spent the past few weeks actively getting ready to move. Next weekend,  the 30th and 31st, is the final one in my current home, so those two days will be filled with last minute packing and a fair amount of cleaning. Next weekend will be crazy, but this weekend? Not so much.

You would think that I would welcome a weekend of relaxation, especially since it is a holiday weekend. After the past few weeks of packing, you’d expect that I would enjoy having not much to do for a few days, but as I said, I’m a doer, I feel compelled to do something productive and with the move so close, all I can focus on is that.

A Familiar Feeling

The antsy sense of frustration I feel as I know my big move is around the corner, but I am a week too early to do anything more about it, is annoyingly similar to how I get when I have an approved Web site design ready to go, template pages built out and begging for content and a client who is well behind schedule in delivering that content.

This is a typical project bottleneck when clients insist on handling the content on their own instead of working with a professional copywriter, often times underestimating the level of work that is involved. This bottleneck, and the grinding halt it puts upon a design process, is something I have been giving a fair amount of though to lately.

At Envision, the Web design process is broken down into 5 parts – Discovery, Design, Development, Deployment and Support. Content submission has generally fallen between steps 2 and 3, after Design is approved and as Development begins. At least, that’s where it is supposed to fall. More often than not, content isn’t ready as the pages begin to be developed, meaning that the process grinds to a halt or the content that is used is not as effective as it could be - neither of which are attractive options.

Treating Content Like a King

Lately I’ve been looking to take a more proactive approach to a site’s content, addressing it in depth even before a site’s initial designs have been started. I have begun putting together a process to review content as part of that Discovery phase, identifying what areas of the site, strictly from a content standpoint, are solid, what pieces need to be updated and what is missing entirely, needing to be created from scratch for the new site.

My hope is that this process will accomplish a few things:

• It will introduce the concept of content editing/creation at a very early stage, giving the client ample time to generate the necessary materials for the new site and making them realize right away how much time they will need to dedicate to this task (and whether or not they will need some help before it is too late).
• It will allow us to be an active partner in terms of content creation for the site from the get-go. Content is indeed king, so it seems silly to just leave that responsibility solely to the client. We wouldn’t let them design the layout (save in those cases where the client is actually a designer themselves), so why do we let them handle the content on their own?  Regular, weekly calls or meetings to review site content are also something I plan to try. I don’t imagine these will be long meetings – a half hour or so at the most, but my hope is that the time investment will ultimately help produce better content for the site in a more timely fashion.
• It will help us, as designers, to create a more realized and appropriate design for a project since we will have a better understanding of what content the site’s design will need to support. Designing a site with no real concrete feeling for the content that will ultimately be presented on the site, other than from a sitemap standpoint, seems inefficient. Often times I find myself tweaking designs at the development stage solely to accommodate content I was not aware would be needed. I don’t expect this process will drive that out entirely, but I hope there will at least be fewer surprises and more educated design choices made at an earlier stage because of this additional information.

I have a few projects on tap that I hope to try this process out with and hope to see some results soon to learn whether or not this process makes for better content delivered in a more timely fashion, but for now…I guess I’ll just have to wait.