A new app, an old site. A pristine Band-Aid, clean out of the box — a fresh scrape.
As a father of four, who recently made the chancy decision to build a bike ramp out of whatever was around, I’ve had a lot of time to think about Band-Aids lately. The bandage itself doesn’t heal the wound. Scrapes and nicks heal from the inside out. A band-aid covers over injuries, keeping them away from further harm. But left on too long, they actually slow down the repair process.
Covering over content problems with a new CMS or a reskin keeps the poison in your system.
Likewise, content resists surface solutions because it resides at the core of your offering. Covering over content problems with a new CMS or a reskin keeps the poison in your system. Eventually the untreated system infects other systems and the beige perforated mask that was supposed to help, hurts.
This is reality: You’ve got limitations — to your budget, your time, your patience. But if you can’t solve content complications at the foundation, at the very least don’t make things worse by covering over it with a big-beige complexity.
Better to let your content air out than keep it covered and not know what’s going on under there.
Ian Alexander
VP of Design — writing on leadership, AI product strategy, and building teams that ship.