I wonder if one of the culprits is the silo-ing of many agencies. The content people may only think about how content needs to come across. The design people see themselves as only visual. The developers often don’t care about anything besides code.

So it’s left up to a creative director to bring all of this together. That is a recipe for failure. Everyone on the team should be working together, of course. (And I’m sure we’ve both been in meetings where the best ideas come from those outside of their particular “area of expertise,” i.e. coders showing brilliance in design, designers coming up with the perfect slogan. It has to do with perspective – being enough outside that area to see it how the consumer will see it.)

I also like what you say about revision. Web 2.0 or whatever the buzzword is today frees us from the assumption that anything ever ends. We should think of everything as a prototype for a future iteration.