 So you might be wondering as a developer why why do I need to learn how to talk content? I'm code. I'm design. I'm you know, I'm building the websites. I don't need to worry about what goes on them That's my clients problem Unfortunately as you may have found out it's usually your problem as well I'm friends with a lot of developers and designers and I hear about their woes of the clients on a daily basis So I developed this talk to kind of give you guys a little help on what you need to do To maybe soothe those burns of pain when you have a client that's like, oh, yeah, I just I need a website and it's like Well, what's gonna be on it? So how many times have you had a project held up because your client hasn't gotten you that content? How many times have you had a project go over your estimates of time or you know pain? Involved because the client has no idea what they want for content How many times have you had to go back and redo? Significant amounts of work because your client changed their content at the last minute. Can I see some hands how many times that happened? Yeah, like all of you I Work for a content development company and that's our job to figure that out for your client You know they come to us and they say yeah, we want content for our website Well, we're the ones who do the work of doing the keyword research and doing the topic research and doing the audience research You shouldn't have to do that for your client. You're in the business of developing their website not their content So this doesn't have to be your reality. There are ways to get around this So an example a friend of mine was developing a site and during the mock-up phase of the design He did a basic wireframe the homepage layout something you know and He's like I need an approval of this wireframe of your homepage before we can proceed I don't want to build this out and have you go. Oh, no, I don't like that. That's why we wireframe So he came up with something like this standard boxes Laura Mipsum just to give them my idea of what would what it would look like Eventually when he built it out Swear to God the cunt the client said What all those boxes and numbers mean and what's what's that nonsense text? Not everyone is gonna know what Laura Mipsum is and not everyone's gonna understand what you know image size of boxes are okay, so Yeah so the solution he came upon was to utilize a Program called Phil Murray a custom placeholder script that puts images of Bill Murray and standard image sizes on your site mock-up Okay, so so now we've got some images, right? Okay. This looks more like an actual website. We're good, right? It was great. It was quirky. It was easy to do and the clients. I kid you not responded with Are all those pictures of Bill Murray gonna stay that way? I Don't remember what a site was about but obviously it would not be Bill Murray So yes, and the spiral of depression with this project goes deeper Custom placeholders whether it be Bill Murray or kittens and believe me there are dozens of them out there They just don't cut it when it comes to identifying the content types and spaces and sizes Or even getting your clients to understand what content is And that's where we have our first problem here The blank slate paralyzes clients and I thank my friend Karina for giving me that quote They don't first of all the word content It's a word that they don't Understand You know we as developers and designers and content creators we understand what that word means it means your images your text Your videos whatever They hear content and it doesn't make sense. It's jargon. So you end to break it down into the actual things you need One of the things we do when we take on a new client for content production is we have been filled in an on-boarding questionnaire Talking about what their clientele is or who they're trying to reach their audience age ranges anything that they know 90% of the time this comes in half filled maybe not filled at all We kind of have to do a lot of guesswork, but eventually we get around it But that's us. We should be doing this not you So if you get a content on-boarding questionnaire that at least gives you an idea of are they gonna have a lot of images Are they gonna have videos? How much of this do they already have developed? Asked for their access to their existing assets or someone in charge of producing those assets a lot of the times I worked for primarily lawyers and a lot of the times they have a marketing person So we grabbed them real quick and we're like hey where your logos where your image files of your staff Where you're building pictures a you know content that you've already written do you have any white papers? Do you have any case analysis? You know stuff like that get that as soon as you can because that at least gives you an idea of what they already have and What they might be producing later on after you build the site So you might get answers like this from your clients. Oh, yeah My content's probably gonna be a picture gallery man Maybe some videos or isn't that your job? Oh, it's not and what about I'm not sure yet I'll finish it out when you want to figure that out the site Well, what if they want, you know a nice picture gallery you didn't build that into their blog part So now you've got to go back and redo your work or what if you design it for videos and then I'm like Oh, well, we talked to the video production company and their estimates were way too high So we're not gonna do videos. Well now you've just wasted your whole time building on a video, you know viewer for them You want an answer like this. I want a full image background that stays when you scroll down I'm gonna be using a lot of pictures in my blogs and posting at least once a week So, you know, you want to big out a nice very easily organized blog role and I might have logo later But not right now so you know that they might have assets in the future So that at least gives you a little bit of work to you know stuff to work with Offer some assistance one of the Tactics I've seen is that you can provide some basic relevant filler content and encourage them to make it their own Some of the designers that I work with they're also bloggers on their own So they'll write in like some basic home page stuff with the limited amount of knowledge They know about their clientele and say hey look This is what is the kind of stuff you should have on your home page But I suggest that you go in and make it your own and put your own message on there that at least Kick starts them to think about okay. What do I really want my website to say? Another thing you can do is work with a creator friend and have them make some samples for that client I have a lot of my developer friends come to me and say hey Could you just like work up some dummy content for them and show them kind of what they should be doing? Or you know a designer. Hey, can you give them some mock-ups of different logo ideas? So at least just get the juices flowing and get them thinking and this sort of mentality To help them get inspired if you've been a developer for any length of time You know your job ends up being a whole lot more than code I've heard for stories of my friends who end up acting like business coaches Helping their clients develop a business model while building their site If that's not above and beyond I don't know what is you don't really have to do that You're in the job of building their website not telling them how to run their business One of the things that I find is helpful is to find sites with similar goals or uses in your portfolio So if they're building a website that sells funky pairs of socks show them other websites that sell socks or similar items And show them how they do it, you know If any of you are friends of Mailchimp, they started their own web store a little while ago Freddiedon company and one of the first things they sold were socks and I thought they had a very good Selling strategy for that. So find sites that you see that are successful and show them to your client and say, you know This is kind of the path you should walk Let's help make this you uniquely and not, you know, just be a carbon copy because sometimes you'll get the client That says yes, I want exactly that and no, no, no, no, that's not cool Show them some sites that you think have great visuals or write a good block of text Not everyone is a poet online. You'll see some websites with horribly boring copy or horribly jargon filled copy as a legal writer my job is to remove that jargon and put it in layman's terms and When you find a website that just talks really well or has a very interesting way to Display information like a huge long blog post. I've seen some very creative layouts and I wish I had links to them, but Give them homework You can say hey look I want you to at least Give a shot at writing this and you know, I have a creator friend I'll have them look over it and give you some pointers things like that at the very least it doesn't take a lot of effort to at least help get your client inspired and The more inspiration they get hopefully the more forthcoming They'll be with the answers that you need about how to finish building their website So at the end of all this you should at least be coaching your client along the way to Give them the tools they need to get started so that you can get the tools you need to get started on their project And if you're like me you probably have cats all over your desk that are impeding your work But you don't need your client also impeding your work So I think both of us are coming up to do questions now that is the link to all these slides. It should be live by now You