Summersault Weblog

Though not just applicable for website development, Rob Swan has written a great article over at A List Apart that takes a deeper look at interacting with clients, knowing the reasoning behind your methods as well as questioning whether or not your methods are truly worthwhile.

In Defense of Difficult Clients

From the article:
"It’s only by being forced to question our beliefs that we can be certain they’re right. The web is an ever-changing medium, we need to be prepared to accept that there’s a possibility that some of our practices are no longer best. Or that—and it happens—they may never have been best in the first place, but no one thought to question them with enough force when they were first mentioned."

When you redevelop a website’s content structure (which often happens when you redevelop it’s graphical appearance), it’s pretty common for directories and files to get renamed, chunks of content to get moved around, and in general, for the site to become quickly unfamiliar to those who had learned their way around it.

If your site is fairly small, this isn’t a big problem - someone can just start from the beginning and get where they’re going fairly easily. But if your site has lots of content, it can be very jarring to have to go find all of that content again. What’s even more noteworthy is that if there are lots of people linking to your site or if you’ve achieved a certain standing in search engine results, rearranging all of your content structure can have a negative impact on how people find and use your site.

So, here are six tips for any time when you make significant changes to the content structure of a non-trivially sized website:
Read the rest of this entry »