Apart from good and sensible elements of design, there is one crucial aspect to a website that will not only please your client, but get more potential clients knocking on your door as well: content. In a previous post, we discussed the robes of King Content that is design, and how it makes all the difference. This time, we’re switching focus to the reason for design in the first place.

“Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it’s decoration.”— Jeffrey Zeldman

It couldn’t be truer of designer, writer, and publisher Jeffrey Zeldman in stating the importance of content. One of the reasons we put up websites for our clients is that they have information to share. They have content to present. And they are doing it with our help as designers.

Yet our efforts as designers will not be sufficient without the help of those who will manage for us what we will design, that is our writers and web copy editors. And still, to work with them efficiently, what we need all the more is something they can’t offer: our client’s information.
How do we then, as web designers together with our writers and copy editors, gather the information we need from clients?

1. Be clear about what you need. Ask your client what their business is all about, what their market is all about, and how they intend to reach out to their market through their website. These are basic, but so basic they are often overlooked. This will spare your team the excess energy required at guessing what both your clients and their clients will possibly be pleased with.

2. Communicate personally as much as possible. E-mail may be a good medium to communicate with a client, but set a personal meeting with them as much as possible, because there are things you learn, pick up on, and discover about them when you’re actually with them. This can help you in deciding how to visualize the feel of their company on their website.

3. Collaborate with your writers and copy editors. While both of you may be knowledgeable about your client, you may have diverging ideas as to how to execute the website itself. While you’re considering a layout with short blurbs for previews of an article, your writer may be conceptualizing just a short one that needs no opening blurb or introduction. Or while you’re cooking up ideas for infographics and photographs, your writer may be thinking of people to interview and narrative strategies for a riveting article about the client. Finally, your copy editor may have trouble interpreting the layout or the text, or their ultimate incompatibility together, and your final output may result in an inevitable need for a major change just the night before deadline.
Work closely with your team. It will spare you heartache, energy, and sleepless nights. Besides, you are called a team for a reason.

This highlights the importance of collaboration within your own team and between you and your client. Information often gets lost or is changed in transformation, so it’s important to be able to acquire and manage it well. Further, it is something that will render your unique, individual roles in the project more important and crucial.

Remember, without a clear idea of where your client is coming from and where they’re headed, it’s almost impossible to tailor-fit a website for their purpose, and one that will stand out at that—which is what you’re client’s with you for.

Quote source: http://designwashere.com/80-inspiring-quotes-about-design/