Content First: The Discipline Redesigns Keep Skipping

The most predictable crisis in web projects arrives around week ten. The templates are approved and beautiful. The launch date is circled. And the content, the actual words and pictures the site exists to deliver, turns out to be an assumption. Unwritten, unowned, trapped in the old site’s worst pages, or awaiting a committee that meets monthly. Design decides how the site looks. Content decides whether anyone comes back.

The launch slips toward the fiscal-year boundary. Lorem ipsum acquires squatter’s rights. Everyone involved swears next time will differ.

The week-ten project is common enough to write the diagnosis in one line: design was treated as the project, content as the assumption. This year, at last, the industry has assembled the discipline that fixes it. Content strategy has a defining book in its second printing, a sold-out conference as of this spring, and a working method. This post is that method, as we now run it.

Why content became the assumption

The structural reasons deserve naming, because they exonerate the well-intentioned. Design is visible, schedulable, and contractible. Comps arrive on dates, approvals happen in meetings, progress photographs well.

Content is distributed, political, and unowned. It lives in departments. Its quality is somebody’s feelings. No one role traditionally holds the pen.

So projects organize around what can be scheduled, and the content ‘phase’ becomes a euphemism for ‘later,’ and later becomes week ten. The fix is not exhortation. Everyone already agrees content matters, in the way everyone agrees about exercise. The fix is sequencing: making content work precede and shape design work, with deliverables as concrete as any comp. To wit:

The content-first sequence

• Audit what exists. The full census our IA practice already generates for structural work (every page, its traffic, its owner), now read editorially. What here is true, useful, and worth migrating? The reliable finding: far less than anyone assumed. That resets the project’s real scope from ‘reskin 800 pages’ to ‘produce the 150 that matter.’ A different budget, and an honest one.

• Decide what the site must say, before how it looks. The message architecture. For each key audience and task, what must this site communicate, in what priority? This produces the ranked substance the mobile-first discipline needs. The two practices are the same conversation at different altitudes. And it converts design briefs from adjective collections, ‘modern, welcoming,’ into content commitments the templates must serve.

• Assign the pens before drawing the pages. Every content type gets a named writer, a named approver, and a deadline that precedes template completion. If no one can be named, that is not a staffing footnote. It is the discovery that the section should not exist, made early, while it is cheap. Voice and tone guidance belongs here too. A page of ‘we sound like this, not like that,’ with examples, does more for consistency than any style manual nobody reads.

• Design to real content. Templates built against actual representative content. Real program descriptions, real bios, real headlines with real lengths. Not ipsum’s accommodating gibberish. Every designer knows the reckoning when real content meets idealized comps. Content-first simply schedules that reckoning for week two instead of week ten.

• Build the calendar that outlives launch. The site that launches complete and then fossilizes has merely scheduled its next crisis. The editorial calendar (who publishes what, on what rhythm, reviewed when) is a launch deliverable in our process now. The operational insight of the whole discipline is that a website is a publication, not a project. Publications have editors, not just launch dates.

The migration nobody budgets: moving the words

One line item deserves its own flag because it sinks schedules silently. Content migration, the actual movement of surviving content into the new structure, is real work that the audit’s math makes visible and most budgets still omit.

The 150-pages-that-matter finding above has a corollary. Each of those pages needs a decision: migrate as-is, revise in transit, or rewrite against the new message architecture. Each needs an executor and quality control.

Migration is precisely when accumulated sins surface. The heading structures that were always decorative. The links that rotted. The images without alt text that the accessibility standard now catches. The tone drift between 2006’s pages and 2010’s.

Our planning rule from projects on both sides of learning it: migration effort runs roughly with page count times decision complexity. It parallelizes well once the per-type decisions are made. And it belongs on the schedule as its own phase with its own owner, not as an assumed byproduct of ‘content entry.’ The teams that budget it migrate. The teams that do not discover week ten has a sequel. It does not need a sequel.

What this changes in practice, and what it costs

Honest accounting from the projects we have run this way. The sequence front-loads effort that used to hide in the collapse. Content work happens in months one and two, visibly, with invoices. Not in month five, invisibly, in panic.

Timelines do not lengthen in our experience. They truthen. The week-ten slip was always the content schedule asserting itself. Content-first just puts it on the Gantt chart where it can be managed.

Clients feel the difference most at the end. Launches that land on their dates with sites that are actually full. And, the quieter benefit, teams that know how to keep them full, because the ownership and cadence questions were settled as project deliverables rather than left as post-launch mysteries.

The discipline’s arrival as a profession simply confirms what the week-ten pattern has taught everyone one at a time. The book, the conference, the job titles now appearing in org charts. The words were always the product. The sequence should always have said so. Ours does now, in writing, at kickoff. And week ten, lately, is just a week.

If your organization has a redesign on the 2012 calendar, the single highest-leverage act available this quarter costs nothing. Move the content conversation to the front of the schedule, before the RFP if possible, and let the audit’s honest math size the project. Everything else in this discipline follows from going first.