Content Content Content
This month I want to talk about Content, Content is King as they say, but the difficulties are compounding and it is only getting worse.
There was a time when clients would spend an afternoon writing a lengthy Microsoft Word document detailing the Various Pages they wanted on their website and filling in nice little paragraphs on ‘About Us’ or ‘Our Ethics’ and so on. These documents were informative consider, often well-written and truly told the reader what the Business was about. I would go further and suggest the times when businesses publically displayed exactly what they stood for are now history.
Today websites are largely based on snippets of information, grabbing titles and small mixins of words that might work with a Google Search Engine – where’s the meat? The cause of this fundamental shift in corporate websites is Time. There’s no time for readers to read things, at least they don’t seem to appreciate the beauty of a well-written product description. It’s been proven through research that reading on a screen is an art form, our eye is caught by significant phrases and subtle catchiness. The dross can go.
However, that is also just an excuse for the busy marketing executive who does not have time to write out their company policy on gender pay gaps. Or who might want to hide the fact that their brand is part of a worldwide consortium because it might reflect badly on their capitalistic nature of doing business? I am a cynic clearly.
It’s a vicious circle obviously, no time to read equals no time to write which means the reader is given a series of bullet points that they then have to judge significant business decisions (in a B2B situation) on that can be worth thousands if not millions on pounds. The very future of their business may depend on choosing a CRM that is based on a few bullet points.
Images speak a thousand words too… this is also another popular misconception on websites today. How does a photo of Jungle tree-tops exactly represent your water brand or your products on a white background explain everyday use in the kitchen? Imagery plays a part for certain, but just employing stock images is a sad reflection of the lengths companies go to to fundamentally give a false impression of what they do. They offer the dream, but as always the reality is different.
Themification
We can call this the Themeification of websites. Life is so much easier, quicker and cheaper if we don’t have to start from scratch. Use a Theme and the website is three-quarters done, swap a bit of text in, upload a logo and some images and you’ll be unique compared to everyone else and it all costs half the price.
They say that the worst salesmen are business bosses, they invented their products or services, they know all the flaws and weaknesses and it takes a pretty thickskinned salesman to sell a dud. Usually, the bosses employ a Salesman, train them up in all the USPs and let them loose on the target market. It works because a dedicated expert does his job.
The same methodology should be applied to a website, employ the website to promote the good parts of the service or products and you’ll get sales. The trouble is swapping out a few strap lines and photos is not how you would treat your Salesman. You wouldn’t say here a few brochures stand by the underground entrance and hand them out.
Salesmen are trained with good knowledge, lots of examples, and a keen sense of incentive to get the product or services into the customer’s hands and even to support the new customer after the sale has been concluded. Not to mention all the upsell opportunities.
Picking a Theme is financially a very attractive proposition and we as website designers recommend it far too often – we know our client’s pockets are limited. But if you can afford 60k plus on a salesman that brings X amount of business to the company per year, then you can afford a decent website.
Themification has responded to the ‘Time’ problem and ultimately it’s a plaster on what should be your biggest and best-selling tool – your website.
Content Organisation
Now I pivot this post back onto the problems with Content, in the early days of websites you’d have these pages of who what why content that was relatively straightforward – but today we have Instagram, Videos, Chat, Banners, dynamic content, bestseller lists, PDF downloads and the list goes on – the variety of content is unlimited and somehow it all has to fit together. Coherently.
It requires a lot of vision – in one’s head before one starts one needs to anticipate what it all looks like before one has so much as put pencil to paper. Websites are interactive so you can’t yet know if people will use the Forum, or will you allow comments on your news articles. How will event booking work? It’s all chicken and egg. Facebook was a very dull place when there were only 10 users.
At NCompass we take the line – construction of the About Us page first and then the Contact Us form next. Forget the rest – The Homepage is absolutely last on the list.
The Homepage has to be dynamic – it shows the best of your website be it news articles, customer stories, best-selling products, seasonable information, alerts or problems. All that needs to change automatically. Therefore you can’t really predict what content it will hold – so forget about it,
Concentrating on the About Us page gives you the opportunity to set what Titles will look like, how you want the fonts to be displayed and what items should go in the header or footer of the website. Once the About Us page looks reasonable you will be completed four-fifths of the design work. Moving onto the Contact Us page then sorts our what forms and buttons will look like – it effectly means you are setting the user experience for the interactive elements of your website.
And then rolling out other ‘static’ pages is easy, the privacy policy, cookie statement, services pages etc. All straightforward. Our next area of attention when it comes to contact might be either the Blog or Product Pages, depending on the business or website needs. The Blog is important because a lot of the navigation of a website is determined on a Blog. Will there be a search function? how will users navigate from Post to Post? Will you require feature posts to be displayed on other pages of the website? the same is true of Product pages.
However, Product pages have an additional complication of Categories or Collections, but by now you will have set your Titles and Fonts, Buttons and Forms – so generally most aspects will just fit in. Job is will on it’s way to being done. You’re left with a bit of design for the Checkout Process. It’s totally manageable by now as so much of the design will have already been set up.
The Homepage
All of this leads up to the Homepage. Because now you’ve had a chance to go through all aspects of the website before you have even thought about the Homepage and certainly we as designers will have, by now, learnt an awful lot about the business we are trying to represent. The homepage becomes suddenly much easier.
The trouble with Homepages is that 9 times out of 10 the client or business wants to promote everything usually at the top. There’s a huge desire to put the top product, latest event, newest news story, and easiest contact method all at the top, front and centre so that when users land on the page – they want to buy something.
In truth, it should not work like this. the purpose of the Homepage is to get people off the page as quickly as possible – getting people to the right information within three clicks used to be the mantra. This goes for all pages on the website, if a user is looking for Widget A – then really you want Google to send those people directly to your Widget A page and bypass all other pages of the website. I mean why make people go through the additional steps to get to what they want to know at all.
The Homepage therefore needs to be light and informative and clickable. It’s in sections that redirect people sensibly to where they need to go.
Conclusion
If thinking of a new website for your business or company do it backwards start at the most basic pages, go back to writing up pages in Microsoft Word documents and get the ethos and history of your company out there first. Then consider how people will contact you.
Grow the website… if you follow this simple road, the website will actually take shape and form around the core company values and the most important things will shine on top. To often clients think the Homepage is the most important starting point, but it isn’t in fact your whole marketing will be geared to getting people away from the Homepage.
It’s how we approach nearly every job.