5 Tips for Content Building on your Website

This week Riyad, our very capable front end developer, outlines 5 tips for content building on your website.

So your website is in the process of being designed and you now have the task of deciding what goes where? You may be a small business that offers many services wondering how to showcase all of them effectively? Or maybe you are a photographer wanting to showcase all of your pictures from the past twelve months? Or maybe you’re selling products and need to ensure that users are exposed to as many products as possible from the moment the webpage loads.

Websites can fill various needs. Whatever the need, content is most often the most difficult and most time-consuming part of the process. Here are 5 tips to help along your journey to rolling out your website:

1. Try to choose and highlight 3 main items for your website and place those above the fold on the homepage. The fold is what you see of the website before scrolling down. Then try to decide what the second and third most important items are and place them accordingly after your main items.
2. Avoid clutter, you may offer 50 different types of services that all relate to one industry but try to categorise services into more manageable chunks so that users can see snippets of many things at once.
3. If it’s not ready take it out. Too many sites go live with pages live but missing. Lines like ‘shop coming soon’ should be avoided. If you only have 4 pages ready to go live and others in development then roll out pages as they become available.
4. Pay attention to images, whatever content you are working on should have an accompanying image on a website. Good images can make or break a design.
5. Every situation is different but if you follow the general UX Flow –> Features –> Services –> News –> Widget Info, you will have a good base from which to start your content hierarchy. From there you can tweak accordingly. Your UX Flow is the User Experience Flow – it is how the users of your website will experience your website. It is how it feels as a product. Your Features are the things that you want to highlight the most. Your Services are the things you offer as a business. Your News includes your blog feed and anything interesting related to your business. And lastly your Widget Info relates to social media. This would be buttons at the bottom of your page which link to your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.