Clever content management

Good web designers understand content management.

Not just the technical jargon, data relationships, etc but the physical side to population and actual ‘management’ of the content. Content is King.

It affects everything from user experience to your websites rankings- producing good, relevant content can be difficult. Any efficiency that leads to an effective process for producing your content can be the difference between a dynamic and fresh web site and a static and out of date web site.

Some tips include:

1.Write as much of your content before the design team has completed your site design and provide sample content

2. Take the IA and designer through some of the content so they can understand its relevance to your business and help you understand how to make it relevant to your user. If the content fits the design in a way you are comfortable with writing for your site will be easier

3. Don’t write too much – keep it to the point, offer more information on deeper pages if that content is relevant to your user

4. Standardise on image sizes – in a content managed website you want to produce an image library that can be shared throughout the various pages rather than be specific to one area

5. Make different image sizes proportional – making it easier for updates and resizing

6. Try to anticipate trends of possibilities in your industry so you can be prepared in advanced and take advantage of natural search

Producing new content for your site should be a recurring item on your list of things to do.