I spend every day creating content. Producing tons of emails, IMs, reports, lists, task notes, designs, plans, maps… more than I can list, really. Most of it is low value, if you ask me - but this particular post really isn’t about the value of different kinds of communications, so I’ll leave that can of worms closed.

This is actually about thinking I engineer a smarter publishing platform - something that makes it easy to share what’s on my mind, rather than creating more publishing work. Something that becomes a place to capture the content I create that doesn’t seem superfluous - rather than another reason to create content.

It’s a simple idea, really - and the more I thought about it today, the more I began to think about how that might benefit my clients too.  Every time we do a new site, that’s always the hurdle - where will the content come from? “We’ll have to create content for the website.” Well, will we? Really? Or do we need to distill our ideas about what we need to share with people and create that, then just make the small efforts needed to share that over multiple mediums? It’s not a new idea, exactly - but it’s definitely one whose time has come.

The idea that producing content equals producing value is a fallacy - most of the time, producing content is about producing noise. And we, the same people who think we’re creating value that way, complain about it in others. Complain about how people could have just said what they meant, complain about the ‘thoughtless’ email forwards we just delete, complain about people who answer our email but not our question, complain complain complain. (Okay, maybe this post will have a little to do with the value of communications.)

Well, we can’t change them - but we can change ourselves, right?

So you’ve seen the barefoot. Here’s where the pregnant comes in - because this time around, I plan to spend my month away giving birth to something better. Something that’s leaner - and more robust because of it. Something that takes less time - and so has more value. Something that means writing less - and offering more because of it. How will I do that? I’m not 100% sure yet - it’s going to involve a little honest review of what really has value and what doesn’t first.

Maybe you’d like to join me - and when we do your website, we won’t have to wonder where the content will come from.

Many companies are lured by the same promise – not realizing that buying an email marketing tool doesn’t make you a competent email marketer, any more than buying a band saw would make you a competent carpenter.

And soon after purchasing this email marketing tool, the problems begin…

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This week, the links are all about clients - who they are, what they do, what they should do, how to get them, and more.

Paul Boag of Boagworld.com considers the role of the website owner, from pseudo project manager to visionary. It’s worth reading. (Boagworld has a smashing podcast too.)

As ‘pressed in a previous post, FreeLanceSwitch blogged about the 12 Breeds of Client and How to Work with Them - but what hasn’t been mentioned is their post about the Pitching and the Decision-Making Styles of Clients. Both worthy reads.

SitePoint, publisher of many things worth reading, offers an article to help freelancers find clients - a good starter piece for freelancers trying to build a client base. Donna Gunter adds a few choice bits of advice in her blog about getting more clients online.

Mr. Design Designer has an entire blog about clients from hell, and Graphic Define Magazine offers some advice on how to deal with difficult clients.

So that’s this week’s links. If you’ve got some to add, please do!

I think they’ve forgotten one, truth be told - so I’m going to add my own…

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How do otherwise savvy marketing firms miss this critical part of the user experience? Hours are spent contemplating a user’s experience when everything is going well: how users will find the needed starting point on the homepage, the help text and instructions that will make sure they’re able to follow an easy process, and clear messages about what’s happening all the way. That is, until the user makes a mistake or the software suffers some small problem - and then the user is suddenly cast into uncertainty. In the worst cases, they receive some server-generated error message, citing numeric codes they don’t understand and containing alarming code snippets they have no hope of comprehending. Certainly many users know what a 404 error is - but what about the ‘500 Internal Server Error’ that likely runs a close second in frequency? Or the even more ominous ‘502 Bad Gateway’ error? For the user, all of these messages seem much more like error 417: expectation failed. The process they were trying to follow has brought them to a confusing dead end, and the website they were trusting to guide them to success has let them down.

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How can that be? There’s plenty of information about how important content is. How can companies who want to succeed on the web be so disconnected from such a major key to success? Are those of us who build the web just bad educators? Is it a classic case of companies focusing on style over substance?

To add to that, many of our clients write their own web copy. Though they have no copywriter on staff, and certainly no one who is experienced in writing for an action-oriented medium like the web, they ask us to cut copy writing services from proposals. I understand why boot-strapping start-ups do it (even if they likely need it the most), but I don’t understand why companies with budget to back their marketing would.

I also don’t understand the rampant cart-before-the-horse thinking. What good will great search rankings do if the copy about your product doesn’t sell it? What value is there in turning up #1 on Google if, when I get to your site, I just end up clicking my back button because I can’t figure out what you do or why I should care?

So now I’m working with a non-profit organization, and they have great ideas about the image they’d like to present on their website, what kind of photos are appropriate, which parts of the site they might be able to charge for access to, and where to link in all the methods by which you can donate to them. “Great,” I say, “Do you have a content outline yet?”

The answer: “No, we’ll worry about that after we’ve built the site.”

Sigh.