Web design and how content matters (oh and milk)
August 29th, 2007
Something a little different this morning…
When you are designing a website or a blog or really anything deployed over the internet or intranet your content is always going to be the most important aspect of the entire design process.
I was reminded today of the situation where a client has a particular look or feel that they want to focus on and they avoid answering the questions that really matter. Of course the flip side is that if you don’t have the right designer they aren’t asking the right questions.
What is your content? And variations of this question (where is your content, how big is your content etc etc) are the most important question you can ask yourself or for that matter be asked when planning out a new website.
More often than not people have an idea or a concept that sounds like a cool concept and would be ideal as a website but that is where it ends, or they get caught up worrying too much about the colours and not enough about what is going to be in there.
The look and feel are important, really important, but it shouldn’t overshadow the purpose of your website or blog. You need to get that clear in your first before you start worrying about what it is going to look like.
The way I like to explain it is using milk.
Think of milk as your content, the information that you will be putting into your website. Now picture going to the guy who designs milk containers and asking him to build you a container but the only information you give them is that you want something to contain ‘milk’.
How much milk are we talking about?
“I dunno, but I want the container to be blue.”
So the poor milk container guy doesn’t know what to build to suit. Is it lifelong milk and need to be in a tetra brick? Is it two litres or 500 ml so they know how big to make it?
I’m sure if you were pressed and being creative you could come up with at least another 20 or so variables that would affect the design process for the milk container.
It’s the same as a website. If you have a lot of content we’d need to work out how best to display it or find it. If your content is mainly photos then we should look at a way of displaying those in an innovative way. Maybe the site is going to be interactive, or restricted to who can see everything.
The tone of your writing may be playful, dark, moody, cheerful, miserable, energetic, peaceful (now this is a list that could get out of hand!).
If you’re thinking of building a new website or blog it’s just something to remember. Think about what you are going to be writing/presenting before worrying too much about what the colour of the borders are going to be!
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