Hello, this is John Locke for Lockedown Design.
Today, I want to talk to you for just a few minutes about why we as web designers need
to be gathering content from our clients a little bit earlier in our process than maybe
we are accustomed to.
A great number of web designers who are all far smarter than I am have all said that content
is really the foundation of web design.
We're not really designing the container, we're designing the content.
That is what we come to a website for.
Websites are conversion machines.
We want people to come there to take a particular action.
Designing the content is really important.
We can dress anything up to make it look decent.
But if we truly want our customers and our website visitors to take the actions we intend
for them to take, then we need to have the content at the beginning of the process.
I can hear a lot of designers saying, and even a lot of clients saying, "Well, what
about using placeholder text?"
"What about using lorem ipsum or stock photos?"
And to that I say content is not really the images or text; content is the message behind
them.
That is really what we need.
Case in point, I'll tell you a little story.
A friend of mine was telling me about a project they were running with a client.
They had little widget areas in the sidebar where text was supposed to go.
They used placeholder text until the end.
And it ended up needing to be rewritten, because the content they received was way too big
for the container they were supposed to go in.
Another little story I'll share with you.
Another friend of mine, they were designing a site and they had the visual layout and
photos all ready, but the copy writing, the person they had assigned to do the copy writing,
the tone was all wrong.
The demeanor and voice of the content they received was totally not aligned with what
the company was trying to sell.
You see, here's a couple pitfalls of not having the content at the onset of the project.
One, the voice and tone of the message might not fit the visual design that you have set
up.
#2, Mobile strategy!
You've got to know at the beginning of the project what is the most important information
and the hierarchy of information, so you can give priority to that on mobile.
Three, you got to make your content portable across all sorts of different devices.
And depending on how big your site is, the bigger it is, the more you've got to do the
content audit up front.
The bigger the site, the more - it is imperative to get the content up front.
It's going to be seen on all sorts of different devices.
It might even be seen on all sorts of media platforms, with a different strategy for each
instance.
Mobile is the default view and the default use case for people accessing your information.
It is NOT desktop.
Desktop is less than half of the usage now.
Mobile is more than half.
Meaning we have to have the hierarchy of information right at the beginning or it's not going to
work.
So, there's just a few reasons.
The content informs our design.
It;s not the other way around.
The design can't be looked at as a generic container.
Because we WANT people to take ACTION.
We want it to not just look pretty.
We want people to take action when they come to our websites.
We want them to convert.
Or we're not doing our job as meeting our client's goals.
So, what can we do to make sure that we have the content at the beginning of a project
and not at the last second or last minute?
Well, one thing that we can do is make it explicitly clear that when we go to write
a proposal or go to write a contract that content needs to be delivered by a certain
point or the project is going to go on hold.
Now this is really tough for a lot of people to do, because a lot of people, like the clients,
perhaps haven't thought about what they are going to put on the page yet.
Well maybe we need to work on that up front, work on that aspect with them, on that part
of our web projects, before we get to designing how it's going to look,and how it's going
to play out and how it will be presented.
Somewhere past the point where we've done the research and right about the time that
we've figured out the architecture, as in "What is the most important information that
we need to display?"
- that's when we are going to need that content.
Now, some content is going to be more important than others.
But we need that important stuff to design the main pages.
Ideally, we would have all of it up front.
But if we can't, do what you can.
Yes, I live in the country.
Anyway, I'm John Locke.
And if you have thoughts or ideas on how we can get content at the beginning of a project,
or the benefits or downfalls of doing so, I'd love to hear from you.
Leave it in the comments below.
Or send me an email: john@lockedowndesign.com . This is John Locke signing out.
Peace.