The Website Looked Great Until We Added the Content

My sample content fit the design perfectly. Then the client tried putting their business in it.

I once built a team page that looked excellent as long as everyone on the team had approximately the same amount of name.

The sample profiles were tidy. Short names, short job titles, square photographs. Each card sat at the same height, with a small biography underneath. I checked it on my phone, adjusted the spacing, and moved on feeling like someone who had completed a piece of work.

Then the client entered their staff information.

One person's title needed three lines. Another had supplied a photograph taken from far enough away that my careful crop featured mostly a hedge. The biographies ranged from a sentence to a fairly detailed account of someone's career. All of this was reasonable information for a business to put on its team page. It was also deeply inconvenient for the team page I had built.

My first instinct was to ask for shorter biographies. If everyone could stick to roughly the same length, the cards would line up again. We could probably shorten that title, too. I had designed a website for the people who worked there and was now considering whether the people could be adjusted to fit it.

The client asked which part of the longer biography they should remove. I read it. There was relevant experience in there, along with an explanation of what the person did. I couldn't point to a paragraph that was obviously unnecessary. My strongest editorial objection was that the neighboring card ended sooner.

That made the conversation a little harder to have with a straight face.

I went back to the page and let the cards grow with their content. It made the uneven biographies less disastrous, but it didn't make the page particularly good. Someone looking for a contact still had to scroll past a small autobiography to reach the next person. Letting the text fit had solved one problem. We still needed to decide how much belonged on that page.

We ended up using a short introduction on each card, with the longer biographies on separate profile pages. The client helped write those introductions because they knew what visitors needed to know about each person. We gave the titles room to wrap. For the photographs, I showed them the shape of the crop and asked for replacements where we needed them. The person in the hedge became visible.

None of that was especially advanced development work. Most of it was a conversation I could have had before spending time making the sample cards match.

I'd treated content as something that arrived after the design was done. In my head, the client would swap out the words and we'd be finished. But I'd made decisions about how much someone could say, which photographs would work, and how people would move through the page. The sample text had let me make those decisions without noticing them.

It had also been remarkably cooperative. If a heading wrapped awkwardly, I could change the heading. If a paragraph made a card too tall, I could remove a sentence. I was both the developer and the person supplying the content, so every disagreement ended in my favor.

The client had reasons for their words. That made them much more useful to build with.

For a page like that, I'd now rather get a few awkward examples early: the longest title, a biography someone cares about keeping, a photograph that wasn't taken for this particular rectangle. They give us something specific to discuss while changing the layout is still ordinary work. We can decide what belongs on the page together, with the content in front of us.

There's still a place for placeholder text. Sometimes you're working out the broad shape of a page and the words aren't ready. I just have less confidence in a finished-looking screen when I've personally selected everything that goes into it. It may be showing me how well I've arranged my examples.

When we reviewed the revised page, the client spent most of the call checking the staff details. Someone had changed roles, and one of the introductions needed updating. They edited both in the content system while we were talking, and the page held up. I left the spacing alone long enough for them to finish.

You can also join my newsletter for occasional notes on work and updates on my books.