The Right Content In The Right Place

No matter how good the content on your website is, if no-one can find it your chances of successfully converting a visitor into a customer are severely reduced.

Why make your visitors dig around for the good stuff when you can just as easily spend a little bit of time on organising the best place for everything. This is a key area where our expertise can really help your business to grow, simply taking some simple steps to organise and categorise your content can make it that much easier for your visitors to find what they need.

And if they can find what they need the first time, the next time they are looking for something they are likely to come back to your site as their first stop on their journey, afterall if you could help them last time it's likely you can help them again. A well organised website, with easy to find and logically grouped content will go a long way to secure you a regular set of visitors, and hopefully customers.

Content Audits

One of the first things we recommend to clients is that they take the time to audit the current content on their existing website. So often we come across websites that have content strewn all over the place with no real logical categorisation that would be logical to a first time visitor. Much of this is due to the website owner not putting themselves in the shoes of their customers and simply lumping content together that feels logical to them.

And as websites grow over time it's not uncommon for a well organised and logical website to develop into something less than stellar as new content is added and old content is updated or moved. Too many websites are created with little scope for expansion or future growth meaning that after 12 months of updates they are a far cry from the finely tuned machine they once were.

We can review your existing site and provide you with a detailed inventory of all the content you currently have on your website so that you can review and prioritise. This is a valuable tool during any redesign as it very quickly flushes out which content is vital and which is really just peripheral to the core message that your business is trying to portray to visitors.

Sitemaps

Once you have a clear picture of the current content included within your website as well as any new information that you are interested in presenting to visitors, the next step is to create a well defined site map that outlines where all of your content will be housed. This involves creating logical groupings for similar content as well as determining what links there will need to be between the key sections of your site.

By building up a sitemap in this manner it allows us to determine how complex your site will be and the types of navigation structure which will be required to guide users through the content. For very simple sites a basic navigation system can be utilised (tabs across the top of pages for instance), whereas for more complex sites we may need to use multiple navigation elements such as left navigation, in page navigation etc.

This process also allows you to logically create a hierarchy of content so that you can see how long it might take for visitors to reach different areas of your website. If it is going to take too long getting to one area then there may be a good argument to split it into smaller chunks depending on the likely use the information will be.

A good sitemap will provide a solid backbone for any good site redesign.

ask us to help with your information architecture needs

Page Hierarchy

Another key exercise when redeveloping a website is to recognise that not all pages are created equal. As a user browses through your site it is likely that as they move from page to page there are different types of content that you will want to highlight to them. In many instances the deeper into a site that a user visits the type of content and the layout of this content will change.

By reviewing the sitemap and architecture of the site we can begin to develop a hierarchy of page types that will be used throughout the site. Each of the different page types will cater for the different areas within the site the user is, as well as allow your business to highlight key information where appropriate.

By identifying these page types and their hierarchy we are then able to prioritise content within them as we develop wireframes that are used to illustrate page layouts and content areas.

Wireframes

The purpose of a wireframe is to help you to visualise how and where content is going to sit within a page that a visitor is viewing. It can help to illustrate how key calls to action will be placed relative to page content and also provide suggested positioning for other page elements such as imagery or supporting links.

Although wireframes can be quite prescriptive they may not necessarily be an exact representation of a page's design as in many cases once a designer starts to work within the boundaries of your brand and/or existing design there needs to be some fluidity to allow them to be creative. With that said if there are key elements within the page that are crucial to the page layout and design (for instance contact information or 'more details' links) in many cases these do find themselves being designed in the exact same place as the wireframes may suggest.

The great benefit of wireframes is that they provide a quick and easy method by which people are able to engage with a site layout and they can help prioritise page content (when combined with copywriting). Due to their lo-fidelity nature they are easy to update and they can help to avoid any issues of people's 'opinion' as they are usually not designs to the extent that people tend to get emotionally attached to.

A good quality set of wireframes can also help to drastically reduce design time by providing designers with a very strong layout direction, allowing them to concentrate on the creative rather than the positioning of elements.

ask us to help with your information architecture needs