Best Practices

I sat down yesterday and wrote out all of the stuff currently going on in my life that requires my attention. I am a juggler with a lot of balls in the air. Most of these items involve developing my freelance web design business. There’s a couple of personal items in there, but for the most part it’s about growing The Web Shop. (Actually one big to-do is the rebranding of The Web Shop that is going on right now.)

My point is that at least the next few weeks are going to be extrememly busy for me. I’d rather not just leave my Best Practices blog fallow for that long, though. So consider this an open casting call for guest bloggers. Maybe you’re asking yourself, “Why would I want to write a post for someone else’s blog?” Here’s one blogger’s take.

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Last week I hired an assistant. Can I legitimately still call myself a freelancer? Probably not. This gig has grown into something that any casual observer would describe as a fully functioning (albeit small) business. Well, I’ll always remember my freelance roots. I started this business on nights and weekends, and I continued to work from home for almost a year after I decided to give it my attention full-time.

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The habit is easy to fall into. I find myself from time to time thinking of text as just an expandable block element I need to account for in my design. And truthfully for the role I as a designer and programmer play in the birth of a web site, maybe that’s all the thought I need to give it. But the fact is that content and design are both critical to the long term success of a web site. Where does the text on the finished site come from?

Did the client decide to leave the dummy text that I thoughtlessly spit out during the design process as a placeholder? Did the client rewrite everything? Do I even care? Maybe it’s an ego thing, but I want the sites I create to be useful and effective for my clients. Since content plays such a big role in determining that sucess, I do care.

With that in mind, I asked Theresia Whitfield of Fletcher Communications what words of wisdom she would share with web designers on the idea of web content. The rest of this post is her response:

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