Tips for Organizing Your Website Content

Always stay focused on the customer’s user journey. Whenever you are organizing content for a new or updated website, make sure you’re evaluating the user journey to provide the right information to the right users at the right time. Sounds simple, right? Not always. You should always begin with a website strategy that will help establish your navigation, creative direction, Development/UX/UI, etc. This is an important first step to go through to make sure you’ve thought through the user journey.

The homepage is where most of your traffic will land on first – organize your homepage hierarchically so that the most pertinent and important information is up front and center. This could summarize your key differentiators from your competitors, your value statement, how your service/product solves your customer’s pain points, or the latest news and updates – it all depends on your key business goals and target audience. Starting with a wireframe can be helpful in organizing all of your sections up-front before jumping into design. From there, you’ll want the user to flow through a series of other key focus areas of your business so that they can get a good overview of who you are, what you do, and why you do it, all from your homepage. From there, they should be able to link through to other areas of the site that go into more detail. Similarly, it is extremely important to organize your navigation in a way that is intuitive and clearly guides the user to the information they are looking for. I’ve seen some cool looking websites that use cryptic wording or bleeding edge navigation styles… Yeah, they look cool but they can also make it 10X harder for your potential customers to find the information they are seeking. As always, it depends on the amount of content you have, your target audience’s intent, and your business goals.

– Hannah Taylor, Director of Production Services

When organizing content for a website, start with creating a route you would like your users to take. Once you have that road map, then you have a better idea of the buckets of content to provide and the navigation to offer. That is your rough draft! Now ensure your draft encompasses the goals you have established for your site. For instance, if one of your goals is to increase the number of people signing up for your newsletter, make sure the route you have created leads to the newsletter signup form… in more than one place. That’s your second draft! Finally, reach out to a few users and potential users and gather their feedback on: why they would go to your site, what are they hoping to achieve upon visiting, and how intuitive they felt your navigation was. Now tweak the route to ensure the flow is intuitive to your users, the content is concise yet informative, your goals and objectives are more likely to be achieved, and the user experience is a pleasant one. That is your “final” draft… until tomorrow. 🙂 Always evolve your site to reflect your evolving goals, your users’ ever-changing needs, and the site’s added value. Search engines will reward you for it.

Spending the extra time at the beginning of creating your website content will save you some time and headaches down the road. I would organize everything into folders labeled to match your top navigation. Within that folder could be more folders for subpages. Inside these folders, I would collect images that would fit the content, and also use google docs to write the content. That way, multiple collaborators can edit documents without having to keep track of versions or emailing files back and forth.

Map out your site first so you have a plan. Create a clean, concise menu and organize pages underneath similar menu items so that you direct your customer exactly where they need to go. Make sure your contact info and calls to action are clear so you can accomplish your goals with your website.

One thing that is crucial when organizing your website content is that the most important information to your organization should be towards the top of the page. Many times we click into something at the beginning of the web page before we even think of scrolling all the way down through the page. People want to find the information they need quickly without spending extra time scrolling and processing information on your page. Get them what they need quickly and as efficiently as possible!

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug is a book that talks all about “common sense” web design. What it really boils down to is that your content needs to be organized in a way that is as easy to interpret and intuitive as possible (don’t make the user think). All content should follow the “3-click” rule whenever possible. If the user isn’t engaged, or can’t find what they are looking for within the first 10 – 15 seconds of visiting your site, studies show they will most likely leave.

How you organize your website content can have a big impact on user experience, SEO, and even the profitability of your site. Having easy-to-navigate menus, eye-catching images, and especially well thought out Calls To Action can make a huge difference. Simple things like having a Contact Us page that’s easy to navigate to can generate more leads for your business.

I think it is important to have content in a clear manner without having too many clicks to the info that is reachable. Having sections of each menu item on the homepage can help with that immensely.