Paper to Pixel

Do you like to be in control of your artwork? Of course you do.
That’s one of the characteristics of a designer, you are responsible almost with your life for the way projects turn out and you will do anything to make sure it’s perfect.

But what can you do with websites where you allow your client to manage or modify the content, grow the site and add whatever they please?

How can you keep up the highest quality level with those projects? Or maintain a highest level of usability if you do not have much control over the content? The site is still designed by you and so is the basic usability but many content based issues may and most likely will arise.

The simplest thing is to start designing for a CMS by assuming the following:

1. The content will most likely be different from what you have been told when the project commenced.

2. There will definitely be much more content than even the client anticipates.

3. And once the client realizes that they can do more with the cms they will.

So what can you do to protect yourself from losing your mind?

1. Allow the website and it’s content to expand.
Always make provision that there more pages will be added, same with content, images, videos and other site elements. Your navigation should accommodate this. Add dropdown menus or a way to create local navigation for website sections. Assume that there will be more of everything.
Also do not design your pages or their elements that are editable by the cms to have fixed height. Always allow them to expand vertically.

2. Always exaggerate when it comes to the content.
I always assume that there will be 3 times more content that I was told. In other words if a client tells you there will be only 3 paragraphs on a page, design as if there was meant to be 9 of them. And preview your designs this way.
This is important to keep the styling and a branding consistent no matter how much content there is on the site. You should always design for larger content that’s going to be on the site.

3. Do not give too much stylistic control to your client.
This generally relates to fonts and colors. Most clients want to be able to change them although from my experience the first thing they will do will be to change them to something not matching your style at all.
Try retaining control over fonts, sizes and colors via your CSS stylesheet.

4. Remember that your templates will be reused to create more pages.
Design them in a way that your client will have no difficulty creating additional pages from them. Also, do not create too many templates as it may be confusing for the client which one to choose for the site and ultimately may generate chaos in the sites layout.

5. Try hardcoding certain elements into the site rather than giving your client access to them.
This mainly relates to thank you and error notes on email forms outputted from cms. Very often this is an overlooked element leaving the site without this strong usability tool.

In other words when you design for the cms you design for change and you should always keep that in mind while working on your artwork.