In episode 78 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Gretyl Kinsey and Bill Swallow talk about the true cost of quick fixes in your content strategy.
“Even if a quick fix might save you some time or a little bit of upfront cost or upfront effort on planning, it’s almost always going to add costs in the long run.”
—Gretyl Kinsey

Related links: 

* Content strategy pitfalls podcast: tools
* Content strategy pitfalls: planning (podcast, part 1)
* Content strategy pitfalls: best practices (podcast, part 2)

Twitter handles:

* @gretylkinsey
* @billswallow

Transcript:
Gretyl Kinsey:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast, brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we’ll be talking about the true cost of quick fixes and common issues that might lead an organization to taking this kind of bandaid approach to content strategy. This is part one of a two-part podcast.
GK:     Hello and welcome everybody. I’m Gretyl Kinsey.
Bill Swallow:     Hi, I’m Bill Swallow.
GK:     And we’re going to be talking about quick fixes in your content strategy today, and how that can lead to all kinds of issues down the road. So I think the place to start is just talking about what we mean by quick fixes.
BS:     And that can be pretty much anything that doesn’t fit the greater plan. Doing things that kind of make things fit or responding to an immediate need with an ad-hoc approach to getting something done.
GK:     Yeah, absolutely. And I think we’ve both seen plenty of examples of this happen. Even if you’ve gotten a really solid plan together for your content strategy, there are oftentimes things that just pop up that do go outside of that plan. And so then it’s often really tempting to sort of apply this quick fix to get you through it. So what are some examples that you’ve seen of these kinds of quick fixes?
BS:     One that jumps right out is formatting abuse. So whether you’re working in structured content or not, ignoring any styles or any elements or whatever you’re using, and just kind of using whatever feels right to you in order to make things look or behave a certain way rather than following what the styles should be.
GK:     Right. And I’ve seen this, like you said, both in structured and unstructured content. And so from the structured side of things, that’s usually going to be a situation where you’ve got some sort of separation between your content itself and your formatting. But if you are used to working where you’ve got that control over the formatting, and then you suddenly don’t have that anymore when you go to structure, I’ve seen people do this tag abuse thing where they will use a tag in a way that is technically legal within the structure, but it is trying to control formatting. And then that can have all kinds of unintended consequences across your actual transformation processes that produce your output. But that’s just a very common thing that people will say, “Oh, I need a page break here, or I need a table to look like this here.” And they do something that’s just a tag abuse thing to get it out the door.
GK:     And from the unstructured point of view too, I’ve seen people do what I would call template abuse....