

How Lorem Ipsum Makes Web Projects Fail - centralism
http://www.valuablecontent.co.uk/how-lorem-ipsum-makes-your-web-project-fail/

======
jiggy2011
In a lot of web projects the content is likely to change much more frequently
than the design. The design will be done by a freelance designer once and be
reused for several years, possibly on multiple sites.

The content is often written by the business owner or as a side job for
someone who works for the business full time and as such gets updated every
week via a CMS.

I've seen plenty of web projects where the client has supplied the initial
content and the design has been built around that. Come back in a few months
and everything is a mess because new content has been shoehorned into places
where it doesn't really work.

In such cases the best one can hope for is a generic template style design
that doesn't break when someone copy-pastes 300 characters into a space
designed for 100.

------
krapp
Meh.

Sometimes you do just need to dump crap into the thing to see what it looks
like, and Lorem Ipsum is better than banging on the keyboard for a few
paragraphs.

I think this is a bit of a false dichotomy anyway -- you can do both, use
filler text and viable copy when it's available. But if, say, you're making a
forum or have a client who isn't exactly eager to dump copy on you, or they
want to write it themselves, or you just want to tweak around on some css,
anything is better than nothing.

------
talles
Using some actual content while developing the product helps a lot reviewing
the outcoming product, thus also aiding the design.

But 'Death to Lorem Ipsum' and '10 ways Lorem Ipsum will kill your web
project' seems to me rather exaggerated.

------
asveikau
I get more irritated that they can take an elegant and memorable phrase like
"dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit" (pain itself, because it may be pain) and
butcher it.

Edit: downvoted?! Doesn't anyone on HN appreciate the classics? :-)

------
lucisferre
This post is definitely light on details but the idea of content first in
design simply the idea that a site is not all about look and feel, but about
what it is going to be used for. Knowing the content, or at least the subject
matter of the future content is pretty important to the design, branding, UX
and so on. I don't think it's about anything more than that.

------
snowwrestler
Terrible, bullshit, linkbait article. And I say that as someone who has been
managing Web content for well over a decade.

> Content people really hate Lorem Ipsum. It says to us: ‘The words don’t
> matter very much. Just fill in this space with any old stuff. No one cares.’

No, it says that you, the content person, have not yet provided the real
content to the designer. Designers have deadlines and can't/won't/shouldn't
wait for content.

It also says that the designer knows that you, the content person, have a
nasty habit of changing content or creating new content over time, and the
design will need to accomodate that.

~~~
vampirechicken
You had me agreeing with you until the last line.

If you, as a designer, view content that changes over time as "nasty" and the
"need to accommodate that" as a burden, then I'd appreciate you announce your
full name here, so that we can avoid you and and other designers who think
you're creating oil paintings or sculptures.

------
smegel
Content-free blogspam.

