My pearl of "wisdom" for today:"A slick website without useful content is like a designer chair, that cannot be sat upon. It won’t be used"Of course this is unless the site is based around a social media tool, which some what puts a spanner in the works...I suppose that's still content though; it's just user generated. Then again...what about interactive addictive gamey type stuff....arrggh my head. Time for a re-think...
...some time later...after some thought:"A slick website without useful content is like a designer chair, that cannot be sat upon. It won’t be used" (terms and conditions apply)
Maybe we should be asking content is still king when we have social media? Is UGC still content or is it a conversation? At the moment, I'm thinking conversation but, if I'm honest, I'm yet to apply any real thought to this....nope I'm already swaying back to content. What a conundrum.
P.s. I should say that apparently the above chair is apparently functional....it just doesn't look it. So that's my theory completely blown out of the water. Find more info about chair designer Osian Batyka-Williams, here.
CMS systems are now pretty standard for any company's website - they bascially let clients control their own content. For a designer this can be the equivalent of sending first your child off to school and hoping that all that hard work won’t be undone by the spotty kid teaching them to say c*nt on the first day.
There are plenty of pros in letting clients control their own content but it can be dangerous in the wrong hands. The last thing you want is for a slick cool site to be ruined by a pixelated,stretched JPEG and badly formatted text. I’ve been thinking about this and believe it’s absolutely essential that everyone using CMS systems aren’t only trained on how to use them technically but also how to use them to good effect. I have perhaps thought about this a little too much and come with the following analogy.
“We are landscape gardeners who spend days cutting the hedges, trimming the grass, installing the water feature and preparing the compost so it's all just right. We then hand it over to the client, to plant the flowers in the beds. If they know nothing about gardening, all the flowers die or look out of place and any visitor’s attention will be drawn to the crappy flowers rather than the marvellous water feature and neatly trimmed grass. As expert gardeners, it’s our responsibility to teach them to dig out the weeds and how to make flowers blossom.”