There was probably no collaboration, no communication, no checkpoints, no agreed-upon process or detailed requirements. The content strategy was misguided from the start. Ignoring Lorem Ipsum didn’t help, and it won’t help now. It’s like saying you’re a bad designer, use bolder text, don’t italicize every paragraph. That’s absolutely true, but it’s not all that’s needed to get things back on track.

The villagers are eager to get their hands on that Frankenstein.

You’ve built all the mockups for the commissioned layout, gotten all the approvals, built or had a tested codebase built, decided on, licensed, or adapted a content management system:

The ingredients you might choose for that TV dinner pizza slice when you forgot to shop for food, the paint you might put on your face to impress your new boss, that’s your job.

But what about your daily bread? Composite designs, layouts, wireframes—do your clients accept that you’re taking the easy way out?

Our business leaders are adamant that Lorem Ipsum is too big to ignore forever.

Not so fast, I think, but there are some positive factors in favor of the Greek text, as its use is merely a symptom of a worse problem that needs to be addressed.

Professional websites use formatting systems.

Commercial publishing platforms and content management systems ensure that you can display different texts and different data using the same format.

When it comes to managing hundreds of articles, product pages for online stores or user profiles on social networks, all potentially with different sizes, formats and rules for different elements, agreed-upon designs can have unintended consequences and look very different than expected.

This is a completely solvable problem, but simply doing without Greek text will not solve it. Using test cases with real content and data in the designs will be helpful, but there is no guarantee that every oddity will be found and fixed. Want to make sure? So a prototype or beta site with actual content published from a real CMS is needed - but you won't get to this stage until you've gone through an initial design cycle.