Why treat the most important aspect of your site like shit?

I encounter this a lot, and many programmers I work with have the same issue, and its to do with a complete lack of regard for your sites most important aspect, site content.

Bear with me as I go on a ramble...

In publishing, the notion of content is alien. They write books and the 'content' producer goes by the title of 'Author' or 'writer'. You have have heard this word bandied about, but its rarely heard in digital design. Its like authorship has been forgotten, replaced by the word 'content' and with it an degradation of the implicit importance you place on writing that the title 'author' conveys. In Journalism, the importance of writing is integral to the integrity of the newspapers that prints it.

However in digital design, the notion of content as varied as the applications that are built on top of the internet. Sometimes in application design there is no authored content, simply functional executions of tasks. Other times, such as in learning resources, that's all there is. And its not always writing as its mixed in with multimedia content (audio, video and images). However, the majority of decent sites, do their utmost to tell a story, and hand-in-hand with story telling comes the importance of the author.

So why is content so devalued?

Is it because of the variety of expression available in digital output,? That there is blurring of the boundaries between application and story, utility and entertainment? Are people are seduced by the delivery that they simply forget to deliver something decent? Perhaps because of this, people forget that in some cases, they even need an writer?

Perhaps it is because authorship isn't needed all the time? As its something considered outside the core skillset needed to deliver a project on time and too a budget (never mind delivering a quality project). Perhaps in the digital arena, there aren't very many good writers?

Whatever the reason, its simply not given due importance when it is needed. It is typically relegated to the end of the process when really it should be the opposite, writing should be the first thing you do.

Which gets to my point about the post, the way people treat content is a true indicator of their standard as a professional.
Information Architects, considered by this blog as a pseudo profession anyway, regularly treat 'content' with disdain. Its seen purely as modules, inserted into a page architecture and not integral to the page itself. In some cases, wireframes show a box with the words "Content in here". This is poor.

Many times the way content is delivered is poor. Many programmers i know complain about this. A long stream of emails, each one containing 'content' hastily written to populate a site that needs to be launched in 2 days time. This isn't a time management issue here, this is a fundamental problem with the process that treats writing with such disdain, that they simply think they can add it at the end of the assembly line.

Which begs the question, why do so many people treat their most important aspect of their site like shit?