How to improve your website user experience
Darren Langley Web Design
Content is arguably one of the most, if not the most important aspects of a website.
It is what gives your brand a tone of voice and shares your company's story.
It also lets others know what you're all about and gives visitors a reason to do business with you.
For some reason, content is always pushed back to the end of the design process.
People wait for a design they like, implement it, and find out that the new layout doesn't work with the material.
If you've been designing pages this way, it's time for a change.
Rather than leaving content for last, why not make it the foundation for all your designs?
Show your designers what materials you want to share, and they'll build around it to achieve the greatest harmony between function and form.
There are many benefits to designing your website this way.
You create a better user experience, reduce clashes between content and design, and avoid the time wastage that comes with redesigning.
Here's how you can improve your website user experience with a content-first approach:
Do Not Use Lorem Ipsum
Many companies utilize lorem ipsum, a dummy content, as a text filler.
While this may look good, it is a lazy approach.
When using dummy content, designers may rush through the design process, throwing in any amount of text that looks good in a layout they chose.
Unfortunately, complications come up when the actual content is added.
A layout may look good with dummy content consisting of three sentences, but what happens if the actual content contains six?
If it doesn't look right, designers have to step back and redo the whole thing.
To make matters worse, content can completely change. Dummy text wastes just as much time as designing without content.
Unfortunately, for most of us, a finalized piece of content takes a lot of time to produce.
Moreover, if it is planned to be implemented during the design process, it forces us to wait.
Fortunately, there is a solution. Thanks to technology, we can substitute lorem ipsum with content that makes sense with the use of proto-content.
Use Proto-Content
As previously mentioned, finalized content is hard to come by early on. You will still need a substitute—but as mentioned, you want to avoid lorem ipsum.
This is where proto-content comes in. Proto-content is a document containing an outline of the material you're going to put in your website.
The main goal of proto-content is to estimate the content's length, language, and voice early on so that you have something to test your designs with.
Your proto-content can be a list of points containing a general idea of the main body along with a guess of the length.
Along with assisting in your website design, proto-content gives you a chance to test new content in front of your audience.
Because of this, you're given more time to edit based on user feedback and ideas.
If proto-content still takes too long, you can use content that already exists on your website.
Although it won't be perfect, it will be closer to the real thing. To minimize conflicts, only use this method on pages that share similar material such as blog posts, company profiles, and team pages.
Stop wasting your time with dummy texts!
Utilize proto-content, and your website design process is going to be as smooth as it can be.
Enjoy spending less time fixing designing mishaps and more time creating new pages to attract even more visitors.
Darren Langley Web Design are a Birmingham web design agency specialising in web strategy - get in touch today by emailing hello@darrenlangley.com to see how we can help.