A blog about new media and business

Whatever you want a website for, content is key to the impression you make on visitors and to your success. And we’re not just talking about Search Engine Optimisation.

A good web design London company will make the way content is presented an integral part of the design and building of your site.

How we read online – You’ve probably noticed that you tend to scan online rather than read every word. We also read roughly 25% more slowly than when we’re reading a book, magazine or newspaper.

So, content has to be presented clearly and simply on every single page. It also has to look consistent.

Content and website structure – 99% of websites follow the same structure – home, about etc – and there are very logical reasons for this that we don’t need to go into here.

If you want to experiment with structure, ask yourself why. Are you doing it to look cool or because you genuinely feel your alternative structure works better?

Don’t be fooled by some of the weird and wonderful structures used by some web design London companies. They’re often showing off to an audience that expects them to be challenging and provocative.

Page layouts – A page layout is the way content appears on your website page and how it works with the design.

Your London web designer will take care of this but here are some things to look for when you’re approving a design:

Do the page sub-heads tell your reader exactly what content is on the page?

What typeface is the designer suggesting? Arial and Verdana are used often because they’re very easy to read.

Does the design have a negative impact on the readability of content? For instance, are there too many colours and different type sizes?

Does the design use sub-heads to break up the page?

It’s also important to remember that most users don’t like to scroll so they’ll only look at the content visible on their screen without scrolling down.

What content? You love what you do and believe you’re better at it than anyone else. So it’s sometimes hard to know what to put into your website and what to leave out.

Even if you’re confident you can write the copy on your website yourself, it’s a good idea to talk to your web design company before you get stuck into writing.

They may well be completely new to you and your kind of business so they’re going to be a great sounding board. If they don’t get it, you’re definitely not explaining yourself very well.

Your web design company really does need to understand you.

Think about:

A short statement of exactly what you do and why you’re different – look at what your competition does for ideas.

What, in your experience, potential customers and users of your site really want to know right away.

Exactly what part of your business or activity each page should cover and why.

Put this down in writing and run it by your web design company. If they’re good, they’ll be happy to help you decide what should go in.

And they want your website to be a success as much as you do, for obvious reasons.

Look at yourself – The simple rules we’ve listed seem obvious but it’s amazing how many websites break them. If you already have a website, look at it now. Is the way your content is presented as good as it could be?

If not, now you know what to do.

Often when website design owners ask for a redesign, their first requirement is that of navigation. They want better menus, slicker movement, more logical hierarchies and a hundred other things.

The most important aspect of any redesign is the content. the clich’ Content is King, still rings true today, and will do for the foreseeable future. A good design helps, great design helps more, but if the website design doesn’t offer anything to the visitor then it’s a failure.

If the site has good content, readability is the next consideration. How will a redesign make the site more readable? Are the colours right? Is the contrast between background and typography enough? Are we using the best font and font size? Are there other size, page width, info box or imagery options we can use to improve it?

Once these questions have been answered, we can move on with the planning.

I think the next most important thing is the back-end. What makes the website design tick? I create custom CMS for all the sites I design, so I have to plan in excruciating detail to make sure I have everything covered. Even using standard systems like Joomla or WordPress need planning to make them work properly.

In order to do this we need to assess the goal of the new site. What is it about the old site that isn’t working any more. What was it that worked well, and what can we improve on. There’s no point making changes for the sake of it, and we need to retain or improve the aspects of the original site that worked best. By retaining as much of the most successful parts of the original, we can ensure that the visitors won’t feel so out of place when the new site is launched.

There will be a healthy dose of familiarity within the new and shiny stuff to make existing clients or frequent visitors feel more comfortable. By doing that, we can grease the wheels of change and ease the transition to the new design.

After all, we aren’t designing the site for us, or our client, but for the users. We not only need to give them what they want, but what they need.