Part 2: Educate your clients and a Boolean search

What approach do you recommend for dealing with site maintenance?
Here is what you do. As much as possible, you separate style from content. Either with Web standards, or with an ugly stupid overpriced publishing system, or with a smart publishing system, of which there are too few.

Then you train your client, if the client will be updating the site. Then you find out everything you can about the software the client will use to update the site. Is he going to take your lovely standards-compliant template and start banging out FrontPage extensions without even realizing it? Find out, recommend and teach.

Before beginning the site, explain what you are going to do, educate the client about the technology involved, keep educating the client throughout the process, do it again when you finish, do it again two months later. Before handing off the site, create a Style Guide that doesn't require an MFA in Design to understand. Take the client through the Style Guide. Do it repeatedly.

After all that, the client will still mess up the site.

What are some examples of what you consider a smart publishing system?
Manila, Greymatter and Blogger all seem to do a very good job at publishing specific kinds of sites.

I think with R&D money and time, these tools could be expanded to do more, and to work with more complex types of sites. I haven't worked with these tools but thousands have and I've seen the results. I've also seen a demo of some of the more sophisticated things Manila can do. I suspect the others have tricks up their sleeves as well.

I've heard some good things about Zope, but I haven't worked with it.

I've had bad experiences with expensive publishing systems used by some of my clients. These systems seemed overly complex yet terribly limited. My experience with them has been echoed by others who've come in contact with them - designers, builders, and clients. My sense is that these products are way too expensive and were way over hyped when they launched.

Colleagues and I have done some limited work with more traditional backend technologies like Cold Fusion and PHP. These tools seem very powerful, but they're not something you hand to a client, they're something you build with, and maintaining structures with these tools requires a certain amount of knowledge.

I have seen clients totally take to these kinds of technologies, say, to update a bulletin board system. One problem I've had recently with Cold Fusion is that it really seems to want me to do everything in HTML tables and FONT tags. This could be due to my limited understanding or it could be that the software is optimized for the "traditional" way we build sites.

For those who haven't dealt much with Style Guides, can you provide links to examples?
That's hard to say, because these are things we show our clients, not things we publish. If they're online they're password protected and there's no link to them on the sites themselves. Advertisers and print designers have been creating Style Guides since the Neolithic Period, it's nothing new.

When I worked on Minolta there were dozens of pages saying what you could and could not do with the size, color, and placement of all kinds of branding elements. Honda does this, every large advertiser does this.

For people who've come to this field from the programming or content side, talk to the designers on your team: they'll know about it and they'll be the ones to implement it. If you're a self-taught designer, then just look at what you've done and pretend you're going away for a long honeymoon and you need to hand the project off to someone who's never worked on it. You'd need to tell them everything.

Break it down: colors, margins, typefaces, size relationships, amount of data per page, cutoff points, naming conventions, file directory conventions, treatment of body text in terms of Styles and also in terms of paragraph length, treatment of links (Few links per page? Many? What gets linked? TITLE attributes? Who writes them? How are they to be written?).

Essentially what you're doing is reconstructing the design and development process, not the mistakes and iterative phases, just the lessons learned, so someone else can do, as much as possible, what you would be doing if you were updating the project.

Any advice on how Web developers avoid link rot (outdated links)?
Don't destroy URLs. Never, never. The only acceptable excuse for link rot is going out of business. It kills me that professionally-staffed, million dollar content sites routinely change their entire file structure, or delete articles that are a month or two old. News sites do it, software sites do it. Microsoft.com seems to have a fetish about changing their URLs every five minutes.

Twenty million people have linked to this page? Good, let's remove it. Let's rename it. Let's get them to perform a Boolean search. I hate this. It's stupid. It's beyond stupid. It's one thing when your grandmother deletes a URL on her homepage. It's another when a Fortune 500 company does it. I am down with Jakob [Nielsen] on this one. I often disagree with Jakob, but on this one we are brothers.

(Editor's note: See our interview with Jakob Nielsen.)

Tell us about your upcoming book, "Taking Your Talent to the Web."
Thanks for asking. "Taking Your Talent to the Web" is a guide for the designer or communications professional seeking to become a Web designer, or to add Web design to a repertoire of existing skills.

For instance, a book designer whose client has asked her to create a small site. She's not going to stop being a book designer, but she wants to increase her professional range. Or an art director who no longer wishes to do print advertising, who finds the Web intriguing, and wants to become a full-time Web designer. Or a greatly experienced creative director who hasn't a clue about the Web.

It's a how-to book but it's also a what-and-why-and-where-is-it-all-going kind of book. It talks about how this medium differs from the one they know, and how it is the same. How Web agencies are structured, and where the designer fits in.

It teaches what you need to know to start working at a Web agency now, if that's what you want to do. But it also explains how the Web is changing, and what you will need to know in the near future. It's a unique book that addresses the needs of a market that should have been addressed long ago, but for some reason, never was.

Finally, what's the story behind your website bio that states "Friend of the Japanese children?"
But I am the friend of the Japanese children.

It's a quote from Godzilla vs. Megalon, I believe. A little boy looks up in the sky and says, "Look, it is Gamera! Friend of the Japanese children." I always loved that.

Thanks for the great insight, Jeffrey!