A response to The Key to Mastering Project Communications (August 2023)
In August 2023 I wrote about the biggest risk in any website project, and it wasn’t technical. I opened with a quote from George Bernard Shaw about the illusion that communication has taken place. Then I described why web projects are especially prone to it:
“The more people are involved and the longer the duration, the more the message gets lost or distorted.”
I’ve watched that happen for three decades, starting with my first company in 1995. A client approves a wireframe, the team builds from it, and months later everyone discovers they pictured something different. Nobody lied. Everyone just assumed they understood.
The demo house
My answer in that article was the model website prototype. I used an analogy I still like. Architects and contractors can read blueprints, but most of us can’t. Let us walk through a model home and suddenly we know what we want. I wrote:
“Instead of showing clients static wireframes, which can be abstract and confusing, why not present them with a working model of the website?”
Clients could click through pages, follow links, try the menu, and notice what was missing. That was true then and it’s one of the best things we ever did. I also noted the reason it had become possible:
“In the past, creating such prototypes was labor-intensive.”
WordPress made prototyping more accessible, but there were still limits. Our prototypes were visually simple on purpose, because every hour spent on a prototype was an hour not spent on the real site. And every round of feedback meant more development time before the client could see the change. The prototype narrowed the communication gap, but it didn’t close it.
The gap between a decision and a working revision
This is where the agentic revolution matters most for communication. AI agents now write and revise custom code under experienced direction, quickly. The time between “what if the menu worked like this?” and seeing it working in the browser has shrunk from days to, often, the same conversation.
That changes the whole rhythm of a project. The prototype no longer has to be a simplified stand-in that gets thrown away. It can be the real site, in its early form, getting more real with each round. Clients aren’t reacting to a sketch of the building. They’re standing in the building while the walls go up, and moving the walls is cheap.
The illusion of communication thrives on delay. When weeks pass between a conversation and its result, memories drift and assumptions harden. When the result shows up quickly, misunderstandings surface while everyone still remembers what they meant. That’s a bigger improvement than any meeting process I’ve ever tried.
And it continues after launch. With Simply Edit, clients make changes right on the page, seeing exactly what visitors will see. There’s no translation between an admin screen and the live result.
Experience still matters most
The other half of that article was about experience. I said the cornerstone of effective website development is people who have been in the trenches long enough to see problems coming, who can fill the gaps a client doesn’t know they have. I also said experience alone isn’t enough, because even experts misread client needs.
Both points hold. Faster building doesn’t remove the need to ask the right questions, notice what a client isn’t saying, and judge whether a working page actually serves its visitors. Agents build what they’re directed to build. Someone still has to know what to direct, and to review the result with a critical eye. If anything, fast iteration rewards experience more, because a good director can try three ideas in the time it used to take to debate one.
We used to accept that communication would always be a bit lossy, because showing things was expensive. That trade off is gone. We can show, react, and revise as often as the project needs. You can read more about how that changes a project budget.
Shaw was right. The illusion is still the biggest problem. It’s just much easier to break now.
¡Viva la Revolución!