Content That Works For Your Website

Recently, CERN celebrated 20 years of the free, open World Wide Web by re-posting the very first web page (you can see it in all it’s terrible non-glory here: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html). One glance shows you why the WWW took off so quickly: This was something just about anyone could do. If you learned about a dozen HTML tags and had server space, you could code your own web page. And for a long time that’s how it was done: You hand-crafted HTML, uploaded the file, and you had a web page.

Content that works for your website

Time marches on, and today web pages are complex beasts. And the longer your web site’s been up and running, the more complex it is. And if your web site actually started out as a collection of hand-coded static pages like that, but today looks at least superficially like an awesome CMS-run example of great website design, then chances are you have a lot of content buried there. Like an iceberg: Most people will only see the newest stuff poking up over the water line. Underneath? A metric ton of content that may or may not work with your current web design  and CMS.

Content Auditing
You shouldn’t throw away that content. Okay, maybe you should throw away some of it. But instead of thinking in terms of what to delete in order to make your site work better, why not think instead about how to make your content work with your design? That starting point is always going to be a Content Audit.

A Content Audit is simple in concept and complex in execution. You have to drill down deep into your iceberg and take those core samples, and build a model of your content. What kind of content is it? What are the features? What do your users get from it? Once you can answer these questions clearly, then you can set about Step Two, which is creating a website design around your content based on the way your content displays and is used.

The Hard Stuff
Now, of course, comes the difficult part: Restructuring your content. Making everything consistent is a mountain, especially if your content dates back to early days, but the reward is huge, because you’ll end up with a sleek, fast web site where all of your content is available. And that’s important because your older content is likely still valuable. Certainly some of it may be dated, or in need of a modern revision, but some of it is probably perfectly good, and you put a lot of effort into creating it. The effort of making it work with a consistent design will bring you rewards in the form of attracting more search results and more engagement with your users.

You spent the effort to create this content, it deserves a better fate than being rendered in a choppy, ugly fashion by a CSS that it was never intended to run through. Save your content from this terrible experience and restructure it for the modern day!

A Website Designer is a blog by Dan Norris a passionate small business Web design expert from the Gold Coast, Australia. Read this full post here Content That Works For Your Website

Original Found Here.. http://awebsitedesigner.com.au/website-design/content-that-works-for-your-website-design/