Valerie Rutherford
By: Valerie Rutherford – Bayshore Solutions Senior Web Designer
So you’ve finally signed off on the design of your brand new homepage and it looks great. You’ve spent weeks tweaking that shade of blue, trying out different fonts, getting your logo just the right size (make it 20% bigger!), rounding the corners of that button just so and finding the perfect stock image to go with that compelling headline. Everything is just the way you want it and it’s time to build out the entire site and make it functional.
Now you may be wondering what all those other pages of your site will look like. After all, no one is going to stay just on your homepage. Once a user clicks on that big button with perfectly rounded corners, what will they see? You’ve been assured each page inside your site will follow the same basic structure you signed off on, but you’ve got lots of different snippets of content – like photo galleries, customer testimonials and registration forms. What will those pieces look like? How will users interact with them? How will they be formatted to flow seamlessly with your new site design?
As a web designer, I would advise customers at this point (if not sooner)that now is the time to gather and refine your website content and meet with us to plan your content design : how your website content should not only look but how it should function. After all, you’ve invested a good chunk of time getting the perfect shade of blue and you’ve probably invested even more time developing great content for your business communications. You should devote just as much attention to formatting it and making sure it works the way your website visitors need it to, otherwise that beautiful new design will be wasted on a sub-par user experience.
When figuring what to style and standardize across all pages of your website, here are some common elements to consider:
- Headlines
- Paragraph text
- Links
- Image sizes and borders
- Captions
- Photo and video galleries/ slideshows
- Blockquotes/ pullquotes
- Testimonials
- FAQs
- Bios
- Bulleted lists
- Tables and grids
- Tabs
- News articles/ blog entries
- Forms
- Tooltips
- Alerts boxes/ notifications
- Submit Buttons
- Pop-up boxes (modal box)
There are many ways to format content, but the website design template should dictate styles for fonts, text color and paragraph alignment (to name a few) to take the guesswork out of what looks good and matches your site design. If some content elements require interaction or movement, additional time should be spent researching options and implementing functionality.
All of these elements should be considered part of your overall brand image and be consistent on every page. A consistent brand image builds trust with your users and that attention to detail speaks to your commitment to quality. That extra step will give your site a polished look and feel that’s easy for you to manage and enjoyable for your audiences to visit. Contact us for help with content design for your website today!
Valerie Rutherford is a Senior Web Designer at Bayshore Solutions— a Web Design, Web Development, and Internet Marketing Company.