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Web strategy: the unspoken step
Today is not the first time this has occured to me: a lot of talk about web development addresses the ‘how,’ but not the ‘why.’
Many discussions cover the rationale for small, specific design decisions. Even with broad topics like usability, accessibility and user-centered design, much of the talk is about how to achieve particular goals. People (including me) say things like:
Making links underlined allows people to find them on the page more easily.
Coding your pages in XHTML instead of offering PDF downloads will make them accessible to more people.
The most important content should go in the upper left (for left-to-right cultures) part of the page.
All of these are valid and useful points. These are the kinds of things I tell colleagues and clients all the time, because they makes sense to me and they are supported by other people’s ideas and observations. But they don’t address ‘why’ in a really broad sense. These discussions don’t mention:
Why we’re linking to the things we’re linking to, or the context of the links (navigation-bar links should look different than in-text links).
What the purpose of our page is, and who the audience is. If it is intended for printing and offline re-distribution, and the users have high-speed connections, maybe a PDF is the right choice.
How we determine what the most important content is. Is it the timely content? Something your client’s Board of Directors likes? The most important content on the old site (if you’re redesigning)?
Overall, I feel like discussion at this level is lacking. It can be found here and there, but it is hard to come by mostly becuase it is hard to conduct. We don’t have good language for discussing broad strategic issues. We don’t really even have a name for it.
Well, here’s a suggestion: Web strategy.
To some of you, this may seem very similar to the “discovery” process mentioned in books and on weblogs. Similar, but better. Discovery implies that you are venturing out, into the client’s world, to collect existing information and ideas. Once your discovery is complete, you act.
But web strategy is about so much more. It’s about immersing yourself in the client’s business, to learn exactly what it is they do and why they do it. It’s about working with the client to develop new ideas (rather than just discover existing ones) about how to use the web. Web strategy is an abstract process through which designers/communicators work with the client to figure out how they can best use the web. It’s a major part of my work, and I imagine it’s a major part of any web professional’s work. So why don’t we talk about it very much?
I’d chalk that up to the complexity. As you can probably tell from the language in this post (though hopefully not), this stuff is hard to talk about. Ideas, goals, priorities, etc — these are tricky things to put in concrete terms. And it’s also one of the most difficult parts of the site production process. Sure, getting your site to look right in IE5 is rough, but it’s nothing like deciphering what the true intentions of an organization are, then translating those to web content and design.
For purposes of getting us talking, here’s how I create web strategy with my clients:
Immerse myself in their business. Figure out what they do, and why. Several meetings, and an intense review of any current materials (online and print promotional pieces, press clippings, etc) are required to do this.
Talk about what they want to achieve. Do they want more customers?* Do they want to establish themselves as experts? Do they want to get the word out about their oganization? This forms the basis for our content and design goals. I’ve spent weeks trying to force my ideas about what a site should do, only to finally realize that the methods I was pushing weren’t in line with their goals.
Figure out what kind of content is necessary to achieve goals. Do we need periodic news updates? Weblog-style posting? A mass of self-descriptive language? Description of past work? A bunch of already existing content, in the form of research or press? They say content is king, and they’re right. At some point, this stops being strategy and starts being content production. But good content is the backbone of any great web site, and that planning for that content must coordinate with broad goals and ideas about the site.
Among this content, what is most important? This sets the basis for our design and information architecture, which must highlight and feature certain bits of content over others. Again, this is an area of overlap between strategy and other parts of the development process — but we must think about the design and organization of the site in conjunction with our strategy for the site if we are to be successful.
This is how I work. How do you work? I am interested in hearing people’s thoughts about what I call web strategy — does this stuff already exist, but under a different name? Am I making any sense?
Spammers still have my comments hijacked, so I ask you to email me (jazer at this domain) until I have installed MT-Blacklist and chased off the hooligans.
* Believe it or not, I have one client who told me they weren’t looking for more business right now.