Good Day. A client asked me for a blog this month, and it turned into a small education. It was for DesignHouse, a salon, and they wanted to keep their clients up to date and, more than that, to push the content themselves, in their own words, on their own time.
They feared it would be hopelessly complex, and my job was to prove it would not. I built it on early WordPress, and it broke more than once, mostly because they would strip out the inline style tags whenever they edited. So I found a way to make the CSS hold without them, styles tied to standard HTML elements, so the thing stayed on brand even when they did not think about it. Getting them comfortable still took time.
I learned that written guides help a little, but the thing that actually works is direct support, walking a person through it, patiently, more than once. That is the real cost of handing someone the keys, and it is worth it, but you should know it going in.
I also learned the hard truth of a content management system. The moment you give a client control, they take liberties, because they do not see the structure the way the builder does. You hand over a beautiful, finished portfolio piece, and three months later you return to find it overgrown. Inconsistent posts, stray fonts creeping in, off-brand colours, all because someone needed the page to say a thing and did not much care how it looked while they said it.
It is like building someone a beautiful front and back garden, returning six months later, and finding it an overgrown forest because nobody once mowed or pulled a weed. Your careful work is still under there somewhere, hidden. You develop a thick skin about it, and you learn to photograph your work the day it ships, for the case study, before the lawn grows over.
And yet, for all the frustration, the blog revealed something I find moving. People need to be heard. They want to voice their thoughts in a way that presents them as the expert they are. We are storytellers, all of us, and a business that tells its story lets people feel included in how it thinks. That, in the end, is what a blog opens up. It is also, if I am honest, why I am beginning to want to publish my own. I have experience worth sharing with the designers coming up behind me, a record worth keeping, and a legacy I would like to craft on purpose rather than leave to chance.
Jonathan Ellis · Edmonton · November 2007