I’m currently working on the redesign of a very prominent website here in Suffolk that covers a broad range of topics of interest to a wide variety of website visitors. The website is therefore very information heavy and needs careful planning to ensure that people can find relevant content. I’ve made it my responsibility to lead on this Information Architecture work (with help from colleagues and the client of course because frankly it would never get done on time without both).
Information design is often the most difficult, mismanaged and even outright neglected component of a website redesign. The main challenges to skipping this phase include the time it takes, a belief that the client will keep the content “as-is” from the existing website and that there’s already an abundance of copy. Too often everyone wants to skip straight to the visual design and offer their website design skills to you in Word format.
Removing any step from a professional web design process will compromise the outcome. Fair enough you only have a limited period of time to spend on each phase – but you must consider it nonetheless and do the best you can. Having a content strategy in place is important because existing content may be part of the problem. As part of the redesign you will remove unnecessary content, minimise the less important and maximise the content and messaging that meets your business needs and user goals. As you go through this auditing process, the content will organise itself into groupings and whilst you’re focussed purely on content, it presents the perfect opportunity to organise the content for physical delivery.
In order to save our minds from being crushed by the enormity of the task of cataloguing and organising our content as we march on towards an informed visual design, I’ve broken it down into four “chunks” of more manageable work from a “content out” perspective.
- Content view.
- Site view.
- Page view.
- User view.
I’ll be writing more detailed posts as the project progresses so make sure you’re subscribed to the RSS feed.
Further reading
Content strategy can help create measurable Return on Investment (ROI) – after all, relevant and informative content is what a website’s audience wants. Content strategy assesses the content a client has and creates a plan for what they need and how they’ll get it. Margot Bloomstein puts forth the case – Motown style.
