Competing interests?

I just read an interesting article over at iMedia - The worst SEO mistake you can make. I mostly agree with it.

I think there were one or two things that are no longer relevant. But, as I was reading,  I realized a common pattern I see over and over from various ‘design’ communities - competing for preceived importance. “Call me in - earlier the better” is the common message. The  impact is always the same - “you’ll be sorry because its a bitch to change if you don’t consider it up-front”.

The interaction designer is an obvious designer brought in early, the visual/graphic designer, the programmer-architect, the information architect too. The database guy wants in there early, now the SEO guy too. What I see more and more is this emerging pattern of specialization, where these specialists are less and less tuned in to the specialties of their team-mates. But, here’s the kicker, one thing that I think takes a big back seat in web planning is - maintenance. By that I mean mostly content maintenance.  I have never seen a website or web app that didn’t need to be changed the day after it went live.  And how to maintain what is built is often so overlooked. Especially when the business owner is targeted as the person intended to make change.

Design everything for immediate change. Make change a priority. Get all these players at the table early - Yes. But don’t let any single one prevail in the battle for perceived importance.  The result - a overall simplicity, loose coupling (likley), cohesion (likely), the simplest thing that can possibly work - also likely… hmmm I”m sounding like an advocate for ‘agile’. Design can scale, don’t buy into the message from someone who says it can’t. And maybe just maybe we need to define a role for a new architect - the maintenance architect - the person who can look across the landscape of what you are trying to build, determine the areas that really do need a bit more priority, but ensure that everything is changeable. Because nothing is static on the web.