Big Sweater Graphic Design

Planning Your Site's Content

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008 at 8:39 am.

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A recent article at Tyssen Design really reinforced a lesson I've been learning lately, through various client projects: know what your site is going to say before you take it to a designer.

It's easy to get carried away with the design of a site. One would think that the site's design is the first thing most users see when they visit, so surely, the design should be the first thing to consider when building a website.

While this may be the case for something that must immediately grab attention and leave an impression on the viewer's mind, such as a billboard or a magazine ad, the fact is, the Internet has vastly different requirements than more traditional forms of advertising. On the Internet, your content must come first. People visit sites, not to see what amounts to an advertisement, but to consume content. That means, for you as a business owner, that your content must be consumable before a designer or programmer touches it; quality content almost guarantees an effective website. A quality design merely honors that content.

Producing good website content involves a few things.

• First of all (and most importantly), you must determine what purpose you'd like the site to fulfill. Is the site strictly here to advertise your business and inform consumers about what you do? Is it here to serve as an online shop? Is it here to showcase your past work? You get the idea: you must determine, in a sentence or two, why you're publishing a website.
• The second point that helps determine content: What, exactly, do you want users of your site to do once they visit it? Contact you? If so, how (via phone, e-mail, or contact form, for instance)? Would you like them to make a purchase? Or would you simply like them to bookmark it? Again, figuring out exactly what you'd like your users to do once they visit your site will ultimately help you write better content for the web.
• And third: How will the content, which hopefully takes the above two questions into consideration, be organized? It's not entirely necessary to outline your whole site; a good web designer can help you in that respect. But it's important to have at least a basic site outline in mind, because that site outline determines the structure of the site and how users will navigate it.

I actually use a questionnaire found at Creative Latitude (PDF link) as an outline when I'm interviewing clients and potential clients. Although I don't use it exactly when setting up a new project (let's face it: a questionnaire, however short and useful, is just extra work on top of piles most small business owners have already), I do use various parts of it, depending on the client (and the information I already have about their particular needs). In my experience, most people haven't considered most of the questions on that question sheet, but the answers to most of its questions are pivotal to creating quality content for your site.

My process is always evolving, but a big part of it is the initial consulting and planning stages for clients' sites; doing that properly ensures a quality result.

As the article at Tyssen Design brings out, the consequences of an inadequately planned site usually include extra expense in the form of revisions to design. As in my recent experience working with a client whose site ended up being about twice the size I expected it to be, an inadequately planned site can also lead to frustration on the designer's part with unexpected additions and subtractions to content. Content determines design, not the other way around, so spend as much time as it takes on your site's content to get it presentable on paper before you take it to a web designer. 

For the best experience working with any designer, you must have your site planned out down to the paragraph—and if you don't, work with your designer until you do. A good web designer knows the web well enough to help you set up the content of your site, and not just the design.

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