Content – the text, photos, graphs, videos and forms you want your customer to see – is the heart of your website. You want visitors to know who are and what you have to offer, and you want to make it easy for them to take a next step, such as making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or scheduling a visit.

Determining what content to include and how to organize it is critically important when building a website. That last thing you want to do is overwhelm your visitors with mountains of irrelevant content or frustrate them by not making it easy for them to find what they are looking for.

The best way to ensure your visitors find what they want is to have them help you decide what goes where. It’s not that difficult, time-consuming or expensive, but it can result in a site that is much more effective.

When building a site, we at Blueprint follow a proven process called User Experience (UX) Design to consider how a visitor interacts with a website, and incorporates that feedback in the design and development.

There are two key components to UX Design. In a previous post, we talked about the importance of User Research — understanding your audience and their needs.

The second key consideration of UX is understanding content – what should be on your site and how it is organized. To start, we encourage companies to invite key staff to identify what content they consider important and how it should be organized. You should also take the opportunity to map out ways to guide your visitors to where you want them to go and what you want them to do.

But it is also critically important to consider what visitors are looking for; after all, they are the ones for whom the site is being built. Too often, content is structured based on what makes sense to the company, not to the users. But findings from the User Research phase will help identify any challenges visitors are having with the content and they can be addressed here as well.

A helpful way to begin is by using a simple card-sorting exercise. Card sorting is a UX research method in which participants group individual labels written on notecards or sticky notes, according to criteria that make sense to them. This method uncovers what content is the most important, how prominent and accessible it should be, and how a user can be guided to a particular call to action. It serves to create the information architecture that matches users’ expectations and also aides in developing the final navigation structure of the site.

With the content defined and organized, we create a prototype that mirrors the appearance and functionality of the live site. That model is then tested with users and visitors to ensure that any requirements or gaps that were identified in the research stage have been addressed. The result is a website that people will enjoy visiting because they know exactly where to go to find what they need.

Knowing what content to put on your site, and how to organize it, is one of the most important considerations in building an excellent and effective website. Blueprint Agencies has the tools and experience to help you help your visitors find what they are looking for. Contact us to learn more.