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Solving The Content Equation
May 5, 2009
What is Content?
So what do I mean when I say “content”? A popular definition of content is this: “Everything that is included in a collection and that is held or included in something”. Notice the word everything. In the context of a website, content is everything. It is the Headline on the page, the image in the header, the caption on the image, the links at the top, the copyright data at the bottom, and everything in between. It is in fact everything. Your site quite literally has nothing without its content. Without content a website cannot exist.
The Problem:
When we began our early projects, design always came first. I came from a print design background, so thats where my focus had always been. We quickly ran into problems. Things weren’t looking right and didn’t function well. The designs lacked something. It turns out our designs were lacking well organized content. We were leaving the addition of content to our websites for the end of the process. We had to change that. We had to put content first.
Content Comes First!
Once we realized our error, we transformed our process. We put content first. When we started organizing, generating, and collecting content before we produced any designs, we noticed a number of positive changes. They all worked together to greatly increase the speed and quality of production. It even made our clients happier! They got a more efficient, focused website, and enjoyed the process.
1. Fast Production.
When people are excited about something they work faster and more efficiently. We try to take advantage of this as much as possible. Usually we talk with people after they have a bad experience with another company. They want a fresh start. They want to improve and they are excited about it.
Gathering content is the most difficult and time consuming part of the web site design process. There are a lot of meetings, writing, small details, analysis and planning. We try to help as much as we can, but the majority of the work is the clients responsibility (most choose to write content themselves rather than hiring a copy writer). By putting the most difficult task at the beginning of the process, we take advantage of client excitement to get them through the content stage much quicker. That way later on in the process those small details and decisions don’t slow the process down.
2. A Strong Finish.
Finishing the process with Design and then Development is exciting and rewarding for us and our clients. For the client, this is the easy part. By the time we reach this phase, the major decisions have been addressed, and they can sit back and enjoy seeing the fruits of their labor. We first create sample designs for the home page and one other integral page in the design. Once those are approved, we design the other pages and begin development. This process can take anywhere from 1-3 weeks depending on the complexity of the site making it by far much quicker than content gathering. When we’re finished, they get to view and interact with their new site on our test servers to make sure everything looks good before launch. This is always a pretty cool moment, its when everything comes together and most people are very excited to see the finished product.
3. Better Quality.
Adapting our process in this way has produced better quality sites for a number of reasons.
Designs were more user friendly, information was better organized, users were able to navigate easier, layouts were more engaging and coherent throughout the body of the site. All of these things benefit not only the user, but the search engines as well. When you make it easy for a search engine to see your site you will rank higher on Google. This results in an increase in traffic and business happening on your site. All very good things.
The Solution to the Equation:
After reorganizing our process our sites are easier to use, rank better on major search engines, and meet our clients goals. We’re always looking for ways to streamline our process and make it even better, and this is just the first major lesson that we’ve successfully applied to our working process.
If you have any questions on how we can put our experience to use for you and your business, please don’t hesitate to give us a call or send us an email. We’re always happy to answer any questions we can.
