Diary of a Website: Communicating About Your Website

We're getting to the last stages before launch with the new site for GraysLland Acres llama and goat farm, so there are last-minute things that need doing: captions for the photos, final decisions about information architecture, little changes to the text. I send the analytics code to Tom and he sends the files to Shan.

Even after launch, there are often little things that need to be discussed or changed.

So how do you communicate about them?

I'm not talking here about the kind of language to use. I've written about that before (links at the bottom of this post), but today I'm just talking about the logistics. We have so many options, from Adobe Share to sitting around a laptop at the coffee shop, that it can be hard to know what will work best.

Here are some things to consider:

• Who's involved? While I like email, emailing back and forth among a group of people can become complex and confusing. If you have several people involved in the decision making, consider getting everyone together in one physical location, or with a program like GoToMeeting, so that everyone can see the screen and hear everything at once.
• Where are you? First, where are you geographically, because if you're in much different time zones, that may limit your methods. But there's also the question of where you are relative to the various communication media. Since I work at a computer most of the time, I prefer email, but let's just try a quick experiment. Complete the following sentence: "My email...

* rings when it reaches my phone, and I check it as soon as it's convenient for me.
* flashes silently on my screen, and I see whether it's important -- if I'm not in the middle of coding or something, or if I'm not in a meeting as I so often am.
* goes to one of my many inboxes, and waits till I get around to checking that particular account.
* chirps when it hits my inbox, and I look at it right away.

If some of the people you're communicating with would answer this question differently from you, then email might not work for all of you. I know that texting works best for some of the people I work with, while Twitter is best for others. Find out before getting cross about people not answering you.

• What do you like best? If you're the client, this is relevant. The phone is never my first choice for communication, but I use it with clients who prefer that. I've even had clients who liked to come and physically hang out with me at my desk, and I'll do that, too. I had a client once who wrote letters. If your writer or designer naturally goes with IM but you hate it, speak up. We have so many options nowadays that you can't expect anyone to guess your preference if you don't express it.

Other relevant posts:

• "Freelance Communication"
  
• "Giving Feedback That Gets Results"