Tim Hatch

Data Comes Last 09 May, 2005

In so many of our discussions at COBA, we get around to the question, “How long will it take to finish site x?”

The answer, in most cases, revolves around

1. Finishing Design
2. Finalizing Images in Design
3. Inserting real content

Why does content come last? This is something that we are all guilty of, ever single one of us. While our websites are being designed to be user-centered, our development of them is not. By forcing the IA to be set in stone early on, we pigeonhole ourselves into having “filler” pages, even if it doesn’t (in the end) warrant an entire page.

But what if the IA comes from the data that actually matters to users? Say we generate a page for finding information about degree programs. Should we have the degree programs listed, and build up from there, or come up with a design to plug in the content to, although we don’t know what the content consists of, exactly?

In this case, I’d say it’s a good idea to make a rough draft of the design in a day or two, get the content finalized, and then migrate the design to something better-tailored to the data as it’s now understood. This is what we did with the still-in-progress redesign of the Murphy Center site, and it’s coming out great – both semantic code and a simple stylesheet.