Content and Band Aids

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.

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.