“Web 2.0″–a funny buzzword for “we fixed the bubble.” There are many advantages to learning from our past, but the number one thing I think coming from these times is a movement to separate content from design.
If you do nothing else in evaluating a potential web vendor, make sure they separate the content of the site from the design. What does this mean?
By separating the content (words, pictures) from the design (look/feel, functionality) you gain better control of each. That way, on the content side, if you need to change anything from one misspelling to a full article, you need not “crack open the big egg” to fix it – you don’t affect the design at all. Furthermore, when you graduate to a new brand or a new site, all the previously existing content is available for you to flow into the new site.
As an example – see any of the blogging sites/software out there: you can write to your heart’s content and then change the “theme” of your site whenever you want — without affecting the long list of posts.
Our crew took a stand years ago to make it a policy that, whether the client asked for such control or not, we build all of our web solutions with this in mind – allowing fixes and changes to website to take only minutes, instead of hours or days. It has saved both us and our clients an enormous amount of time, and time is money.
