Please

Please

Splitsville

1 July 2005
Filed under Business, Design, Text, The Interweb

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a meeting with a client trying to explain why a content management system would be a better option for their business's new website than a series of static HTML pages. I trotted out the standard stuff: "It'll make future redesigns so much easier" and "You don't need to stuff around with Dreamweaver" and "Weee, databases, shabang!"

The client looked puzzled, and eventually (using magic) I determined that her puzzlement derived from the concept of separating the site's content from its design. As she sees it, there's something important - if extrinsic - in the WAY content is presented, and although it might be theoretically useful to be able to redesign a website without touching the content, it's probably not always practically useful. After all, this client has been producing reports and newsletters and working documents for many years, and hasn't ever felt the need to apply a redesign of her company styleguide retrospectively. The old stuff looks like old stuff, and that's, well, fine.

This led me to think about my own redesign fantasy, which I entertain in the form of pencil sketches on the backs of bank slips. I'm a designer. The design of my site says something about me - about my tastes, my skills, my strengths, my weaknesses, my stage of life. Just as eight year-old Virginia's handwriting says, very clearly, "this diary is the work of a precocious ten year-old", the site aesthetic places its content in a distinct personal-historical context. Even if I maintain an archive of previous designs on my site, I'm unlikely to show the posts in their original design context. It's technically possible, but it goes against the spirit of the software that I use. For non-designers - people who choose a blog layout from a list of options - there's still some value in preserving the fact that a choice was made. "Ah, those posts were written in my Pink Phase."

Disregarding the sentimental reasons for doing so, maintaining a strong link between content and presentation in a corporate or business environment is probably also sound. The 'About This Company' page should (obviously) keep pace with any site redesigns, but it should also reflect current company policy on the use of language, the recent history of the company and so on. A website redesign offers the perfect opportunity to revisit and refresh website content.

Of course, none of these things is an argument against the semantic separation of content and presentation, or using a content management system - it's just an observation that one of design's crucial roles is to illuminate text in some way, and in attempting to make the management of the two things simpler, we have to be careful not to sever the meaningful link between them.

Views from the Floor

Naz says:

Interesting. I've been having and dealing with similar things. I've riffed on this idea in: http://www.weightshift.com/memo/old/2005/07/05/strength_in_separation/

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