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Designing_for_Content
| Designing for Content
We’ve all been told that a successful website has great content.
The problem that I’ve discovered is what do you do with and how
to you organize all this great content? Below are some of the
things that I’ve learned in the time I’ve had my own site. Now
my particular situation is one where my site is constantly
growing in content. I didn’t start my site with all sorts of
content at my finger tips. So the tips below are from that
perspective.
1. Keep your content concise and simple. Of course make sure
that there is enough there for your customers but don’t write
pages and pages of information. People are not going to sit
there for an hour reading off of a computer screen, no matter
how good the information is. 2. Keep your content relevant to
your site. Do not start putting unrelated content on your site.
It will be confusing and won’t help you draw customers into your
site. 3. Organize, organize, and oh yes organize. Keep
everything organized. I don’t know how many photography sites
that I’ve been on have these huge lists of how to articles,
hundreds of them which is great, but they are completely
unorganized and I guess they expect you to scroll down through
all these articles to find what you want. So organize your
content. Make it easy to find things. Whether that’s through a
search option or carefully organized subheadings. Make it easy
for people to get what they need quickly. 4. My site has grown
steadily but more than I ever expected and that created a
problem that I didn’t foresee in the beginning. As you add
content and I assume new pages be aware of where you place these
pages in the grand scheme of your web design. Just don’t add new
pages to the bottom of list of links. As the web site grows the
list of links to your other pages could be quite long so keep
some sort of pattern of organization so that as you add pages it
will seem to fit in with the rest. 5. Out of date information.
With all this content we’re all adding watch for out of date
information. Remove content with information on technology that
is not longer used. And cycle out old information that just
isn’t read or was not very popular.
These are just a few things that I’ve learned in designing for
content on my site.
If you have some specific questions please visit my Photography
and Design Forum at:
http://kellypaalphotography.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/index.php and
post your question there.
About the author:
Copyright 2005 Kelly Paal Kelly Paal is a Freelance Nature and
Landscape Photographer, exhibiting nationally and
internationally. She owns her own business Kelly Paal
Photography (www.kellypaalphotography.com). She has an
educational background in photography, business, and commercial
art. She enjoys applying graphic design and photography
principles to her web design.
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