What I mean is that your website team needs three skill sets:

• Content: what it says
• Design: what it looks like
• Programming: how it works

Confusion comes when vendors describe themselves as “website designers.” Usually that means they are programmers – they know their html or php or cfm or whatever they’re using to build your website. In this usage, “website design” is like “database design” – the tech folks have to figure out how to make your site work and design the information architecture, which is essentially about what content goes where.

From now on, I’m going to call those people programmers. There’s a lot of creative work in what they do, and the website troika is lost without them, but they’re not designers.

Designers deal with what your website looks like. Every programmer who calls him- or herself a website designer can turn out a reasonably good-looking site. The colors won’t clash and the pictures will be in the right places. But a real designer – a person trained and experienced in graphic design – can make your site stand out in the crowd.

Constructing a webpage is easy. I can do it. (But this whole article is about why I won’t do it for you.) Lots of people can do it, especially with the tools out there that make it possible to build a website with little or no knowledge of html, php, cfm, or whatever.

Trust your website to the Savvy Intern who knows how to construct webpages at your peril.

You need the website troika. Sometimes you can get two of the three skill sets – content, design, programming – in one person. I know people who can do content and design. I know people who can do design and programming. There are probably a few people out there who can do all three, but I’ve never met them.

Of course there are companies that can do all three. If you’re planning to develop your website content yourself (with, say, the help of a savvy content manager like me), and if you take my advice NOT to entrust site development to Savvy Intern, we’ll be looking for a “website design” company. One of the first things we’ll do is to find out if they have a self-described graphic designer on staff. If not, we have two choices:

• Look elsewhere
• Get an honest-to-goodness graphic designer to work with our chosen “website design” firm

I’ve worked both ways, with a firm that had a true graphic designer on staff and with two different firms, one for design and one for programming. It really does need to be a partnership. The high-level navigation, for instance, needs to come from consultation among all three, plus the input of important stakeholders.

When I talk to clients about their websites, the first thing they want to do is put me in touch with their programmer/site host. While I do want to talk with the tech team early on, particularly to find out what they know is broken and want to improve, I want to talk to a whole lot of people before we ever start to set up a navigation system, sketch a homepage, or fiddle with code:

• The website “owner” – the person or people on staff who actually manage the website and use it to keep other stakeholders informed. Let’s say that’s you.
• Other key staff members or volunteers who will supply content for the site
• The executive team and board members
• Customers, members, clients, constituents, partners – all the groups of people who use the site

We’ll talk about your goals for the site and the purposes you want to accomplish. Then I’ll talk to these other folks about their purposes for using the site and what they wish it would do that it doesn’t do.

I’ll develop a design brief to help designers and programmers understand what we’re after, and manage a request-for-proposals process if we need competitive bids. If you already have a tech team, I’ll work with them in the process of identifying a designer. We’ll talk with both the programmers and the designers about the goals for the site; meanwhile I’ll be talking with you about specific kinds of content and how to organize it.

Only then will we be ready to start thinking about the actual content, design, and navigation of the site. It’s a complex process. That’s one reason you don’t want to entrust it to Savvy Intern.

It’s also why, in the website troika, the content person is first among equals. All three horses have to pull the carriage together, but someone has to be the leader. The content should lead and inform the design and the programming.

Hey, my website troika is closer to being literal than I thought! In a troika, the center horse is the leader. Think of me as that center horse. I can’t pull the carriage alone, but it’s the content manager’s job to keep all three horses moving in the right direction.