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Organizing the content on any website can be a challenge. Poorly planned content placement can cause confusion, and the visitor may not know where to look for the information they need. A disorganized website looks sloppy and can cause a visitor leave quickly. This problem is even worse for websites that have a lot of content and features to offer its visitors. It does not matter whether your site has a lot of content on it because it has to, or whether there are many features on your site that its visitors will benefit from. These features could include things like twitter feeds, RSS content, featured posts, or other blog-related features. By planning ahead, your website can become much more user-friendly, and it can accomplish the goals of a website much better. Goals like increasing subscribers, getting more signups, or getting more customers to an offline location. Before you can design a website to contain a lot of content, you have to know what content and features are the most important, and what should stand out above all the rest. You need to know what content you want a user to read first, and what pieces reflect the main purpose of your website. Things like company history, staff, or terms of service are probably not the main concern of most visitors that come to your website. Make sure that sort of content is available if needed, but the most noticeable content on your website should probably be something describe what your company does, the services you offer, and the products a visitor can purchase. A blog, in contrast, would want the newest content noticed first, as well as any specified featured posts. Other social media or strong branding presences would then be second. Here are some simple steps that you can follow in order to efficiently organize your website for the user’s benefit: 1. Separate the crucial, must-have content from the information that most users probably won’t go searching for on their first or second visit to your website. Determine what content absolutely needs to be there. 2. Now that you have the most important information about your company in front of you, pick out the parts that you want featured. Try to choose no more than 4 or 5. Having too many featured items makes them redundant so that none of are featured. Make sure each feature has a definitive purpose. 3. For now, do not worry about having an organized web page layout and having a place for each of these featured pieces. Instead, just put each feature in an ordered list, from what should grab the most attention, to the least noticeable. Having your content organized in this way will make it much easier to organize it from a design perspective. Now you can implement all of this content into a design that looks neat, balanced, and well-constructed. Having organized content will help visitors to more appreciate a custom web design rather than spend the whole time being confused. As a side note, for people who are designing a content-heavy website for a client rather than for themselves, it is very important that you get all of the website’s content up front, before trying to create a layout. Clients always want to make a bunch of content changes later on, but by having the bulk of the content up front, you will have a better idea of how much space on a web page each piece of content will need.
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