Blog Post 3

Know your client. After a meeting or two, you can get a sense of how a client is going to process what you present to them which is why it’s important to choose the right placeholder content. Sure you can use good old fashion Lorem Ipsum, but it’s not necessarily an effective way to get the right feedback from a client. Think distractions.

Use discretion. This piggybacks off number one in that by knowing your client use what’s appropriate. For example, if they are more on the conservative side then it’s probably not a good idea to use Samuel L. Ipsum. 😬

Try to repurpose. If the project is a redesign, I try to find out what the plan is for content on their current site ASAP. Will they reuse it? Will they scrap it and start over? Most of the time clients will do a little bit of both, whether they realize it or not. Sometimes, the content they currently have is pretty good, it just needs to be tweaked or cut down. I usually try to repurpose what I can and present it in a new way they may have not been able to imagine. Not only does it show them how their current content can work for them but it takes the pressure off them to rewrite everything which tends to be the big roadblock with getting content in the first place.

When in doubt, put in your vision. Sometimes clients need a little more handholding and whether your use generic placeholder or repurpose their content they just can’t get past that barrier. I had a client that got so hung up on the placeholder content during every.single.meeting to the point where I had to change the verbiage to read something along the lines of “Intro heading about [Name of Client] Here” and “a couple lines of text will go here describing the services of what [Name of Client] offers to their customers” and so forth. By doing this, you’re giving them the exact guidelines you need when it comes time for them to populate their content, and usually, this tends to avoid situations where they’re trying to insert a paragraph of text into an area that requires a sentence or two.