Jo Johnson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 20:15:02 GMT

Really useful article, thank you! It’s helped me rethink how and when we collaborate with our clients when they produce content themselves.

In my experience, many small charities and businesses see content as an aspect of the project that they can do in-house to keep costs down (and who can blame them?). This means it is often produced by people who hold extensive knowledge on the subject of the website, or who may be excellent report or press release writers, but who do not have web writing expertise.

We usually write some of the content for our clients anyway as part of the wireframes exercise and this will be signed off by the client before the designer begins making them look pretty. We always write or carefully consult on home page copy, for instance. However, the client usually provides the rest of the content long after wireframes and designs have been signed off. And because our clients often prefer to populate the website themselves, too, again to save costs, it is often only finished at the point when the system is fully tested and literally ready for launch in all other respects. Basically, it’s the very last stage and it is too late and too expensive to make changes to the system at this point.

Now I’m thinking that even if a client can’t afford to use a professional web writer, at least we can help them to produce effective content through providing guidance and reviewing the content they provide. More so than we do at the moment, anyway. We will also alter our process to bring forward content production – clients may feel a little pressured by this as it’ll be unexpected, I think, but the website/app will be so much better for the end result!

Thanks – v. helpful!

Jo Johnson — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 14:41:51 GMT

OH NO! Now it’s happened to me…Apologies. How do I edit my comment?

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by Jo Johnson