DCMOC

Maintenance, Man

May 18, 2007 | Filed under: General

Been a while since I’ve posted…

At our CM&OC team meeting yesterday, we had a great conversation about what this department should be and about our areas of responsibility. The conversation took several interesting turns, including a discussion about how challenging it is for web production staff when a site is built without a content management plan other than “once it is launched, we’ll throw people at it for maintenance.”

We need to remember that Web content changes over time, in a way other media content does not. Unlike a book, a brochure, a clay pot, or a piece of film, users expect web content to be easily and regularly revised to meet their need for new and accurate information. (Side note: this is why “under construction” pages, so popular in the 90s, with their cute icons of little construction workers, were basically pointless. Almost all web sites are, in some way, “under construction.”) Therefore, a truly well designed web experience includes – by its very definition — a maintenance / content management plan. Otherwise, it is just posing as a well-designed web experience for the sake of oohs and ahhs at the moment of launch. Time will reveal it to be a fraud.

Here’s a true (and extreme) example of what I’m talking about: a decade ago, I worked for a company whose first Web site’s home page (at least until I got ahold of it!) was nothing but a big .jpg. This graphic (which the corporate communications team was so proud of) was a sort of collage containing navigational captions, images, even a few announcements of product releases. Maintaining it was basically impossible — you actually had to edit the graphic (there wasn’t even a source .psd file with layers — to update the page, they edited this flat, lossy .jpg directly in an image editor). It may have looked nice when it first launched (in this case, even that’s debateable), but it was outdated within days. The fact that the content could not be maintained made this a poorly designed experience.

Obviously, we’ll never make a mistake that extreme — but it is useful for us to remember that content management is an intrinsic component of the process we use to design web experiences.

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