GroundSwell Design

Writing and providing relevant content for the web is a critical part in the success of your website. Visitors to your site are task orientated. This means that when they visit your site they have a task in mind (booking a swim lesson, reading a news article etc), and they want to start to complete that task in as little time as possible. This means it is very important to think about why people will be visiting your site and to provide the relevant resource in an easily accessible manner. One technique for beginning this process is to produce a mission statement. If you have no already done so why not try out the mission statement technique first and then move on to planning out your information architecture below?

Information Architecture

With a clear objective in mind create the content that is relevant to your desired audience. Content should fall into certain categories. For example newspaper website content sits within categories such as ‘UK News’, ‘World News’ and ‘Sport’. These top level categories can be further divided into subcategories. A useful way to represent this is in a diagram as below:

Going through this exercise is great for establishing not only your actual content but also the information architecture of the site. Information architecture is how the content of your site is organised and provides the design of the navigation of the site. Good navigation, or good information architecture, means that visitors to the site will be able to find what they are looking for, and they will have a good impression of your site and business.

Writing for the Web

So now we have some nice organised content and the beginning of a plan for our sites navigation. Lets take another look at the actual content for the website.

Web content should be kept up to date. How many times have you left a site because the last update date is months or even years old? To ensure people come back update on a regular basis. One way to keep the content current is to use a content management system such as Joomla.

An important point to note is that the style of writing for the web is a little different to the style of writing for a print based medium. Web users tend to scan text to get a feel of a page before reading in-depth, so a good use of highlighted keywords, sub headings and short to the point paragraphs are a great idea. Jakob Nielsen provides a great resource on writing for the web on www.useit.com.

It is also worth considering once you have written some content for your site whether it might be better to split the article into several different articles or web pages, taking advantage of hyperlinks to cross reference related articles on your site. I have done this here with links to the mission statement and Joomla articles in this section.

Remember current content full of keywords will also help your all important Google rating and push traffic towards your site.

So we have some organised well written content with an intuitive navigation system, now it is time to show it off in a pretty site template design!

Page Layout Design

To complete the design stage of a website information architecture diagrams can be usefully combined with wireframe diagrams which represent the layout of the pages of a website. A wireframe diagram starts life as a basic line drawing that illustrates how the page design of your website will work with areas for navigation, search components, banners and content.

Initial wireframes can be done on paper in collaboration with your web designer, a cheap and quick prototyping mechanism. More design content can be added later giving you and your web designer a great feel for what the finished product should look like.

A basic wireframe design:

And a finished design:

Separate Design from Content

It is critical to separate the content of your site from the design of your site for many reasons. If the design template is separate to the content then it is easy to refresh the look of your website without having to re-enter any content. It is also means your website, content and business will be more accessible to web users with different needs such as people who use a screen reader to access the Web. Finally it also really helps your Google rating as the Google web spiders who trawl the web will be able to access your content easily. A happy Google web spider means a good (or at least better) Google rating and a happy website owner!

In conclusion good relevant content, updated on a regular basis, full of keywords that your target customer group use to search on is an excellent way to increase your Google rating. Combine this great content with intuitive information architecture and clean page layout designs in wireframe diagrams and you should have the blueprints for a very successful website.

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