[thelist] Tips for planning content delivery?

[Chris George]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org 
> [mailto:thelist-bounces at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of divaone
> Sent: Wednesday, June 30, 2004 4:35 PM
> To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
> Subject: RE: [thelist] Tips for planning content delivery?
> 
[snip]
> Almost as important, if not more, hand over the documents to 
> the developer in an as-is fashion. Expect he/she will provide 
> the content on the website exactly as you have delivered it, 
> unorganized and riddled with mistakes.
> Also create an understanding with the developer that you 
> would like a means of proofing the resultant web pages and 
> providing any necessary changes - doing this in orderly steps 
> will help.

Unless I am misunderstanding, I don't agree with this. Proofing _after_
the copy has gone to production, based on as-is documents unorganized
and riddled with mistakes is a waste of time and money.

Iteration after iteration after iteration of copy changes that have to
be made to final-format content is always more time consuming and
problematic than ensuring that the original documents have been through
their own QA process - editors, SMEs, writers, managers of content etc.
can edit Word documents (or equivalent) without having to drag the
development staff through it as well. There will be enough programmatic
and aesthetic changes to concentrate on anyway.

Of course, this is all in a perfect world. I've been through 6
iterations on some stuff, and it's a hard lesson to learn, that's for
sure. 

Chris.