Your clients may have detailed requirements when it comes to the design of the website. They might want a minimalistic, innovative, and modern design. But what about the content?
“Ahh, let’s make it more visual,” they might say. Designers and often clients overlook the fact that website content plays an important role not only in helping Google rank your website but helping website visitors take the desired action.
After all, what’s the point if your website checks off on all the design aspects but a visitor bounces off because the content isn’t compelling?
Why should content appear first in the design process?
The content on your website denotes the purpose behind it. It compels the reader to take action, guides them through the website experience, and provides information. A content-first design approach ensures that there’s a roadmap for how design should help optimize the content.
For example, you may choose to highlight certain sections of your content, say the introduction video to your product or an important statistic that shows how beneficial your product is.
It also makes your designers’ and programmers’ jobs easy. They may have in mind a million different ideas and configurations of how the layout should be. But with content already in place, the best ideas can be directed and assimilated in a functional and well-designed way.
How to pair design and content together?
Some websites just draw you in. Ever wondered why? Because the design and content go so well together, it starts telling you a story. Here are three steps to pair design and content together for your website.
1. Determine content and design goals
You may have an overall website goal like generating leads, boosting sales, educating customers but how do content and design feature in this? What are their respective goals that can help you meet the overall goal? By breaking these goals, you can then form a relationship between the two. Here are some examples for both these goals:
CONTENT GOALS:
- Engaging audience
- Highlighting the USP of the product
- Educating the audience
DESIGN GOALS:
- Grabbing reader’s attention
- Highlighting key content points
2. Set up a meeting with the stakeholders
Before you start devising the content, schedule a meeting with the stakeholders to gain clarity and be on the same page. There’s a high probability that your client knows the customers better than you do and the type of content that will work the best for them.
For example, they might prefer to-the-point content than paragraphs of content or you may find out that while video content is the trend these days, the client’s target market prioritizes text content that is easily scannable over video content.
You may even ask them for existing feedback from customers, and have video interviews with them to figure out their core motivations and requirements.
3. Solidify a content plan
When you have all the information you need, you start devising a content plan. It could consist of -
- The types of content you’ll need,
- The people responsible for them,
- The stages in which the content would be worked upon,
- The key highlights of the content,
- The guidelines the team would have to follow
This plan should act as a guiding force for your entire content team.
This is all well and done. But if you’re a design agency, you may have worked with many clients who prefer to write their own content. How do you make sure that the content works well with the design in this case? Let’s have a look.
How to help clients write their own content?
Here are some tips to make this process and smooth and easy for your client and designing team:
- Help them break down the content deliverables and fix a deadline for each one of them.
- Have fixed documents for each content piece that is reflected by a page within the sitemap so that it gives the client a framework to write within.
- If you have worked on a similar content design earlier, provide the template to your client for reference.
- Set up constraints like having no more than six words for the heading that acts a guide for the client’s content team
- Have a checklist in place so nothing is missed and errors are avoided. This will save a lot of time at the later stages and help launch the website faster.
How ruttl plays an important role in this process?
Web designing and content planning have one thing in common - there are rounds of approvals and changes to be made. This means tons of screenshots and emails.
All of this leads to a lot of confusion and misunderstanding (we faced the same!).
ruttl helps streamline this entire process by letting the team edit on live websites, collaborate with each other, and keep a track of all the different versions of your content and design.
To see how it works for your team, sign up for your free account right away!
