The Benefits of Following the Grain

No. This isn’t a post about conformity. It’s a post about not getting splinters.

Since I last wrote about the importance of using tools they way they were intended, I’ve come to believe that even more strongly.

We often search for online tools that work the way we want them to work in the abstract, but there are reasons to follow a tool’s lead and learn a new way of doing things. In a simple example, we don’t complain about light switches because they’re not buttons, we learn how to use them the way the designer thought was best.

Let Your Software Be Your Guide

It’s true for so many different types of physical and digital tools, very much including websites.1

This has come up for me lately in two very different contexts.

Consequences: Staff turnover and the loss of the institutional knowledge

I was chatting with a bunch of nonprofit consultants recently about staff turnover. A key frustration we’d all experienced was the loss of institutional knowledge when a staff person leaves. Even with organizations I’ve worked with for years2, a new staff person can feel like a brand new client.

Even when documentation gets passed on for how to do the day-to-day job requirements (e.g. “Posting news to the website”), there’s often no documentation or discussion about why the processes and requirements are the way they are. (e.g. “We publish news to our blog to improve our site SEO and ensure that newsletter traffic goes back to our website.”)

So often, new hires come in and quickly get frustrated because their mental model of how to do their job doesn’t align with how the new organization does things.

It’s not particularly hard to learn how to update a website. It’s much harder to learn or adapt to strategic thinking that goes into website. That can include structure, content strategy, and even how a website ties into an organization’s theory of change. When meta knowledge of why things are the way they are is lost, it gets very hard to find a way back in.

I’m quite convinced that organizations frequently waste resources when new staff redo existing work not to make it better, but to match their own mental models. It’s why I ask “what has changed?” when people request major changes to their sites.

Benefits: Using headings and paragraphs correctly

On a totally different scale, let’s talk about formatting text! If you’re using WordPress these days, one of the most important skills is obvious yet subtle: using the right type of text block.

  • Paragraphs are for “copy” text
  • Headings are only for section titles that outline the page3
  • The Quote and Pullquote are for quotations, small and large, respectively
  • The List block is for short, consecutive points where the order doesn’t matter (bulleted lists) or it does (numbered lists)

This sounds obvious, but people pick the incorrect block type all the time.

One critical reason this matters is that each block has different implications for accessibility. The choice in text blocks impacts how a screen reader software announces text or how someone can navigate that text.

Less obviously, when I develop a website, I bake in all sorts of small features and design attributes that only work when using each block as intended. (And that intention is driven primarily by how HTML works, not my personal whims.)

Two recent articles reminded me of this. A new small CSS property improves how paragraphs wrap their lines. A different property improves how headings wrap their lines! I’ll include both in new websites, but my clients only benefit if they use the right blocks.

Align with your team and your tools!

To use a metaphor I often return to, websites are relay races. With handoffs from the software to the developer and the developer to the editor, each must play an individual role while sharing a high level understanding of how to run the race.

So when your relay team is turning on a light switch, don’t get a splinter? Go with the grain and reap the rewards!

  1. I also think that there is a corollary or inverse: When a tool is fundamentally intended to achieve a different goal than yours, no amount of effort can fully overcome that. If the “grain” doesn’t lead to the outcome you want, then you need a totally different tool. ↩︎
  2. I have a few clients where I began working with them before any current staff were hired, and so I oddly hold certain bits of long-lost institutional knowledge. ↩︎
  3. They are not a way to make the text bigger! ↩︎