« Facing up to metadata | Main | IA trends survey »

Content guru Gerry McGovern has written about the temptation to build a site when you have nothing to say, or can't say it well. As with many of Gerry's columns I agree in a big way. Unless you have a firm idea of what you want your website to do and say and are willing to allocate time and resources to the development AND maintenance of the site you should not undertake to build one. As McGovern notes, the poor impression created by a badly designed and written website is far worse than the impression given by not having a website. He says:

When establishing websites, some organizations make the serious mistake of thinking that something is better than nothing. Many managers see a website as a project. They measure success based on things done. The website has an online application form, it has a search engine, and it has content. The form and search engine may not work well, the content may be badly written, but that's not what's important. What is important is that the project is completed.

A website is no more a project than a newspaper is a project. The initial building of a site may be a project but the website itself is an ongoing commitment.

--------

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

Enter the code shown below before pressing post

About the Blog

Know and love the templatedata
More
Powered by
Movable Type 3.2