The focus is often on ensuring perfect aesthetics and delivering a great user experience. However, pushing content to take a backseat is only good for some website designs. After all, content is king, and that holds true in this case.
For every web design company trying to create an impactful website, content plays a primary role in making the website persuasive. Without powerful content, the design cannot solely sway the traffic. It can also cause a lot of damage if you fail to realize the impact content has on your website design and its performance.
Here’s what a creative agency wants you to know about the importance of content when it comes to designing a website.
A vast majority of businesses believe that the content and design of the website are the same. In fact, some may even believe that having a good design means having good content. Since it is not the job of web designers or branding agencies to create content, they try to replace the content with the overall design.
This is far from reality — content and web design are two distinct aspects of creating a good website. Information Architecture is a part of website design, but creating content to fit the design is a separate activity. Visual design cannot alone achieve the targets in the absence of proper content design.
Web design and content are two sides of the same coin. One cannot exist without the other. Your meaningful content requires an attractive medium that can deliver the message to your target audience. Furthermore, only when you pay attention to both the quality of your web content and the website design do you stand a chance of striking a jackpot on the search engines.
In other words, the web design on its own is the same as the attractive packaging of a product. Content gives meaning to the design. If you remove your website’s content, all that’s left is the structure. And the importance of content before the design is present all around us. For example, before the cinematography of a movie, which provides its structure, a script is prepared. Similarly, before preparing the blueprints of a skyscraper, the architect focuses on describing the purpose to be served by the building.
Ideally, adopting a content-first approach should be the right way to design websites. It shouldn’t be an afterthought — rather, it should be one of the building blocks. Only when you have quality content on your website that’s optimized for search engine algorithms can you attract your target audience to find your website and navigate through it. Doing so also saves you unnecessary back and forth after you have launched the website.
The best information will be given priority along with web design, user experience, and load time. This overall user experience aims to move away from keyword stuffing and deliver it to the user in a more catered feel. Consumers want communication to be personal and on a one-to-one feel.
But this doesn’t mean you can bypass the need for a good web design. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Unless the picture is beautiful to look at, you are unlikely to capture your audience’s attention. So while thinking about the content should be one of the first things to take care of when you start a new project, you also need to spend time brainstorming what’s the best design and appearance for your website to make it more relevant for visitors.
It is a common myth to equate content to copy alone. Copywriting only focuses on creating marketing-driven content to lure in the audience and provide them with relevant information about a product you want to sell. But text alone is never enough, especially since most humans are visual learners and retain best when exposed to other forms of content.
In the context of web design, content refers to everything that is on the website to narrate a brand’s story. Explainer videos, testimonials, custom logos, whitepapers and guides, infographics, different buttons for navigation, inquiry forms, and interactive elements qualify as content.
Given the wide ambit of content, it is clear how content can impact various web design decisions. For example, if you are planning to add explainer videos for an ecommerce website, you will need to answer questions such as — how many videos do you need? Should they all be of the same length? Should they be shot in the same way? Will the videos have animated elements?
Answering questions that are focused heavily on content makes it easier to present the information in a more structured manner and develop an efficient design. It gives you much space to experiment with your ideas and try out different iterations until you strike the perfect balance.
Content is what brings your website design into action. That’s why the content strategy should be at the forefront when you are working on the design.
Here’s how the site design gets impacted by content:
There needs to be more than just the KPIs of the website for the design process. You need to supply relevant content to achieve those goals. Once you have an idea about what the overall structure of your website will look like, you should focus on identifying what type of content should fit into those pages. To put it differently, can you create a high-converting website if you are unsure who you are trying to target and what works for them?
Before you begin wireframing, working on a content map to gather a holistic view of the different types of content you need to include on your website is essential. This will ensure that you only include content that’s directly aligned with achieving your goals.
When your content is adequately optimized for speed, devices, and search engines, it improves the overall usability of your website. Keep in mind that your audience is pressed for time and doesn’t have the luxury of browsing through countless pages to find what they are looking for. You need to make the process of content discovery as seamless as possible if you are serious about preventing your customers from getting diverted to a competitor’s website.
For instance, your web design may have taken care of the requirements to make your website more mobile-friendly. However, your website is unlikely to perform well unless you present the content in short paragraphs that are easy to skim through.
Appropriate content strategy focuses on increasing the usability of a website. The words you choose for the content and how you present it are integral to the web design process. Here’s a cheat sheet of what you need to remember when you are finding the sweet spot between your content and web design:
Your website should be divided into various segments and categories to showcase different types of content. This makes it easier for the users to locate them without having to browse through every single page.
The design should be such that it appears the same regardless of which browser or browsing device the audience uses.
All the information on the website should be arranged logically, and ample space should be left between paragraphs to increase legibility.
Both the design and content should be created, keeping in mind who the target audience is.
Say, if you are designing a website meant for senior citizens, pay attention to how you arrange the information throughout as well as the kind of content you publish. While the tone should be straightforward enough to connect with the audience, the arrangement of the content should be easy to follow, even for someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience navigating through websites.
Suppose you start building a website and keep adding various elements, such as landing pages and inquiry pages, but you need to know their content plan. Trying to fit in the content last moment can lead to compromising on the design or the quality of the content. This can result in back and forth on the core design itself and force you to redesign multiple elements.
But by making content the focus of your design process, you can avoid redesigning woes. A clear content strategy makes it easier to accommodate design needs than doing it the other way around.
Moreover, search engines only boost such content that fits the site’s content and design. Unnecessarily stuffing your content with keywords won’t fetch the desired results. Rather, you run the risk of getting penalized.
Content first web designs allow developers to focus on creating certain website components while the designers work on the layouts.
The design gets fine-tuned on the fly, providing more time to test the initial designs in the browser and pivot if needed. When the content team works with web designers, they are in a better position to piece various moving pieces together.
Keeping sight of the big picture also helps save money and finish the website on time. Otherwise, there is always a risk looming large that you may fall behind your launch schedule only because you are unable to integrate the content and design elements harmoniously.
Given that web design and content work together to deliver the message to your audience, focusing on one at the cost of neglecting the other can have dangerous consequences.
Among other things, SEO is a tool that can be used to ensure that both design and content work in harmony for search engines. In fact, SEO can help attract the right type of incoming traffic and increase the likelihood of your website making it to the first page of search engine results.
This can be especially useful for local businesses that want to leverage their website to receive qualified organic leads. Imagine you’re a bridal boutique in Los Angeles, targeting local leads who are looking for bridal boutiques in the area. If you neglect local SEO, it is possible that the organic search results for users will be only full of big brands and directory sites.
Think about getting a web design company in Los Angeles on board to ensure that the relevant local keywords and phrases are added throughout the content of the website and also in the images on your website as a good web design practice. This can boost your chances of getting noticed by search engines.
Also, make sure to start your project with a clear strategy. The strategy’s ultimate goal should be delivering the best user experience while maintaining the perfect balance between website design and content.
It is the content that draws the audience in. Design only makes it easier to present the information in a structured manner and makes the experience more enjoyable. In the absence of powerful content, functionality, and style don’t add up to much.
When you have a strategy focusing on content in the early stages, you get more room to mold your design requirements for a better user experience. However, the reverse is a challenging task.
The goal should always be to emphasize function over form because you can only know how to present information efficiently when you learn what information you want to present.
