According to Bill Gates, content is king, and it’s hard to argue with that, especially regarding site development. By and large, content equals user experience. It embraces visuals, videos, texts and data housed on your website. If the key site purpose is attracting an audience via worthy and topical content, then you should consider its filling before establishing a web resource itself.
When companies decide on a content-first approach, they tend to do their best to centre-stage all their perks through efficient and captivating UX design. In this article, we will cover what a content-first design process is, why it matters and how to craft the best web content design based on its greatest practices.
Content First Design Essence
This concept means the project content defines and shapes the overall site’s design. So you should carefully think about the texts, pics, tables, charts and lists and any other things popping up on the page or screen as all of this forms the content.
It will be perfect, to begin by exploring everything that needs to show up on each page. Are you going to build an info board with charts or tables prevailed? Or a marketing-based site with appealing pics, illustrations and relevant-topic texts?
The more deeply you dive into what post on the site, the better you may outline a design fully matching the content. We can compare it with the house construction. The architect must know the exact room number before setting off the building. So try to learn as much as possible prior to undertaking designing.
Content Driven Design Significance
If you don’t prioritize generating and collating content, it may end in different serious issues that might harm your business in the long run. Such problems involve:
- Product projecting, development and launching delays.
- Templates and content aren’t coherent at all.
- Too many or too few available templates.
- The site design vision doesn’t meet the actual content.
- While using dummy content, severe tech troubles may arise.
- Designs can get hurt when it takes place the replacement of eye-catching imagery with low-quality visuals accessible to use.
The Hottest Content-First Design Tips
Define Content Strategy:
It goes without saying there is no universal strategy that will work out with each content for website design. Everything depends on your company goals and expectations. But one common rule here stands for delivering relevant content to the appropriate audience at the right time. And, of course, it should come from business intentions, research, audits, testing and the public you long to attract.
Each element is crucial, especially company goals and research. Since the content without a profound awareness of what you’re striving to reach and who you intend to showcase to makes no sense.
So there’s no right answer to what content strategy is the most efficient. It has to be based on how content flows within your company’s work frame and what your actions are from the content-design perspective.
Still, whatever strategy you choose, guest blogging is the tactic that only empowers your site. That way, it would be wise to incorporate it into the daily agenda. So check it out for marketing guest blogs that accept guest posts. Such a practice will doubtless enhance your content first and flawlessly design your pages as a result.
Conduct Content Inventory:
The next step involves a content inventory that implies the exploration of all the pages’ filling and included features. In most cases, a person who does it explores every currently existing detail and marks what is better to keep, rewrite, merge and delete. The given audit serves as the outline for sitemap creation, which gets passed to a designer to plug further into the design eventually.
The problem is that content inventory and audit outcomes in large spreadsheets put rarely reviewed. Plus, designers and developers commonly don’t go beyond programming and coding. But what if they were directly taking part in the audit process? They can and should be a part of this to handle the difficulties of each content type representing. This will considerably facilitate avoiding scope issues in the future and help with the right prioritizing.
No worries, if the team doesn’t have a content strategy expert, the designer may still carry out an audit to achieve the best web content design. And even if such a specialist is available, their core task is to arrange a team meeting for the overview of inventory results together. Thus, each team member may give valuable ideas to design efforts that might influence content creation and its types. Read this article on 10 crucial tips to improve the website design and learn more about boosting your site design via content.
Perform Content Modeling:
No less essential are content models. They reveal the content types’ relations and properties. It would be better to start with a domain model to figure out where content fits the UX at most. Besides, it implies a more objective way to evaluate content since the team selects concepts and specialities to utilize.
This will provide UX and development teams with valuable insights for building a shared awareness of scope and goal. So by getting to know what content prevails or must prevail, designers at the early stages may come up with how to bring this to life in an incredibly user-oriented way. The same relates to developers. They can start thinking about how CSM might come in handy in content generation. Such a team effort will certainly bear fruits.
Craft Templates:
Once you’ve gotten specific content models your project will need, it’s time to move on to template crafting. Large sites commonly apply from 5 to 7 templates to support hundreds or sometimes thousands of pages.
No doubt, templates form one of the most efficient methods to make your users familiar with the site. It advances their navigation across the site, helping them find the needed info much more quickly. Plus, it’s less challenging to generate and keep a limited page type amount with different content presented there.
Wondering how to create good content first design templates? Try to take all your done work and attentively search for similarities throughout all your pages’ content. For example, if you build a blog, all text pages must be of the same formatting. Running a marketing site, your specs page may look like a pricing one.
Another critical question following that is how many of that pages have to keep to the shared format. The best practice for defining similarities will be making your templates’ thumbnails. This will give a clear vision of whether you need a template to contain 5 images and plenty of text or 30 pictures and a few of the text.
Work On Style Guides:
As practice shows, visual and editorial style guides are typically mutually exclusive. The designer keeps to the visual style guide while the editor or content specialist interacts with the editorial guidelines and photo editors from the retouching services like photoretouchingservices.net. So if you combine them into one ultimate guide accessible to all designers, developers, content-makers and authors, be sure it may impressively boost content for website design.
Some edits can negatively impact the overall design, the same as style and even font decisions may change the structure of the copy. Additionally, authors would like to know what way their texts will show up on both PC and mobile screens. Visit Fonts Arena to find out more about win-win stylings and fonts.
Working in a digital environment is highly important to have online style guidelines to reference. Even if the editorial guides house at the same place as the visual ones will surely keep things more concerted.
Conclusion
The content first design is a great way to build a website in the present market. As content is taking over everything and has become the base of reaching your products or services to the users. It brings designers, agencies and marketing professionals to one stream and empowers them to create a great website.
