One of the notorious holdups in web development projects has historically been when clients are responsible for their own content. Its something we try to avoid, as we do offer copywriting services, but nonetheless, when it comes to content, clients are typically pretty possessive.  They are the subject matter experts, therefore they should write the copy....right?  However, they quickly realize what we warn them about starting with the kickoff meeting - it ain't so easy.  There are multiple issues:

• Many internal stakeholders and subject matter experts = many opinions
• Once you realize you've bitten off more than you can chew and delegate some of the work, you are left in the just-as-difficult position of managing many different content authors
• These content authors actually have other jobs which inevitably are a higher priority than copywriting for the web, making deadlines next to impossible to meet
• Once the content all comes back, you realize that it has inconsistent voicing and tone, not to mention format
• Once the content all comes back, you realize that it needs to be linked together in key places, since this is the internet and not a series of unrelated articles
• Inevitably you don't realize the need for some crucial pieces of content until late in the game.  People notoriously miss section landing pages, although these are crucial to a site's success

The above issues occur despite our best intentions as an agency - we provide content matrices, content development templates, consultation on best practices for writing on the web, and many other services.  But content development still inevitably extends the project timeline in projects like these.

As our static web site development (static = collection of flat html pages) dwindled and was replaced by ubiquitous and affordable content management systems, we were encouraged.  The clients who want to develop their own content are empowered to do so, and we can create the final infrastructure of the website without waiting for final copy from the clients.  However, things are not always as simple as they seem.

• For some companies, it is hard to shake out of the standard editorial and review workflow process they are used to – in fact, for companies such as this, often times the editorial process is the only thing that will enable them to see the forest for the trees as it were and truly feel ok with the overall structure of the web site in development.
• Other companies are decidedly not technical – even though most everyone reading this is used to web interfaces, many companies function in older paradigms, and the interfaces in some of the content management systems (CMS) can be a bit tricky – this is especially true of some of the open source based systems.  This trickiness tends to get better over time (for example Drupal 6 is much easier to use than Drupal 5), but is an unfortunate but understandable side effect of open source development where many different programmers are able to contribute to a product.

So we’ve found ourselves, especially on the side of the OakTree house that used to do a lot of HTML development, transitioning over to much more technical implementations on the one side, and a lot of training on the other side – training both on the use of CMS systems and on good web focused content development workflows and processes.  It’s definitely a change for the positive and helps our clients get a head start towards the final goal, which is the creation of a site which is a living document – with content that is constantly added, modified, and removed to suit the needs of the user community.