I’m an avid reader of .net magazine and generally find it a valuable source of inspiration as well as technical and practical information.  But an article in the February 2009 irked me slightly.  In “Branding with Brains”, David Hamill, a Freelance Usability Consultant underlined the need for usability over brand guidelines.

Usability is – and of course should be – something which is rising quickly up the agenda of many website owners and designers.  Ensuring your site is accessible to as many people as possible is not only a marketing no-brainer, it’s also socially responsible, ensuring differently abled people aren’t excluded from your website.

What irked me, as a marketer, was David’s article seems to assume a “them and us” relationship between web designers / developers and marketers: Marketers being more concerned with rigidly ticking to brand guidelines than of creating site that works properly? Not any marketer worth their salt David. And aren’t the brand guidelines usually established by a designer anyway? Certainly in my experience.

No, the root of the problem here, as is so often the case in web projects, is that the right people aren’t being involved in the decision making process at the right time, and, yet more common, there’s a mutual misunderstanding between the roles of web team and marketing.

Having project-managed numerous websites, and often acting as peace broker between design, marketing and dev teams, the key to a truly successful website is sharing.  Sharing of information, so that all parties why a site should look, behave, or be accessible in a certain way, leads to common understanding, mutual respect, and ultimately, the achievement of common goals. In_fighting and muddled thinking has killed more than one great website, and has left many a marketing campaign in the starting blocks. David makes a number of valid points in his article, but let’s stop falling in the same traps by continuing to put marketing teams, designers, and developers in silos.

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