Get Rid of Your Junk Before You Move

The other day a Salvation Army truck pulled up to a house on my street where professional movers had just moved in a new owner. The driver and his colleague carried several large pieces of furniture and some smaller items into the truck to haul them away. I wondered why my new neighbor had paid to move all that stuff, if he was just going to get rid of it a week later.

This scenario reminds me of website redesigns and the importance of content inventories. Why would you want to move outdated or irrelevant content into your new website? It’s much more efficient to decide what to keep and what to get rid of well before you migrate content to a new website. By making these decisions early, you reap the following benefits:

make the process of organizing your site (information architecture) smoother help focus the scope and purpose of the site and reveal any content gaps that need to be filled get writers/editors started and finished well before you need to move content into the new site get …

Read More →

Feeding the Beast: Some Thoughts on Carousels and Other Website Features

Our website redesign clients often want a collection of large, rotating images on their new homepage (we’ll call this an image carousel, though these features vary in functionality). Clients say they want to use the carousel to feature their programs and initiatives and promote upcoming events. One client wanted a huge carousel because they saw one they liked on another organization’s website. But more recently, a client told us, “We just can’t support a large carousel.” They knew their limitations.

Carousels can be compelling, but they require high-quality, high-resolution photography or graphics, and stock art rarely fits the bill unless it’s skillfully edited and isn’t used by other companies. (How many times have we seen that same ethnically balanced group of people huddled around a laptop?) So before you opt for a carousel, make sure you can support it so producing appropriate images and supporting content doesn’t become an unwelcome chore, or, as one of our clients called it, “Feeding the beast.”

Having a carousel on your homepage is a commitment to provide fresh promotional images and supporting content regularly. …

Read More →
photo of scary house

Eight Reasons You Need to Audit Your Web Content

When we redesign an existing website, the first step is a thorough content audit. The premise is, you have to know what content you have in order to make good decisions about what to do with it. Some content may be migrated to the new site as is. Some will need to be revised. Some can be eliminated. New content may need to be written to fill gaps.

Let’s be honest, though: Content audits are a pain. They are labor-intensive and can be time-consuming, especially for very large sites. (For ideas for auditing large sites without losing your mind or blowing your schedule, see this post from Brain Traffic’s blog: http://blog.braintraffic.com/2012/04/auditing-big-sites-doesn%E2%80%99t-have-to-be-taxing/.)

Staring down a content audit spreadsheet, clients sometimes ask, “Do we really have to do this?”

Dear clients, Yes. We really need to audit your content. To convince you, I’ve put together a list of reasons, collected from various projects over the years.

You need to audit your content because:

Not even you know what’s on your …

Read More →

“Requires Internal Discussion”

I was reviewing the written feedback on an annotated site map I had produced for a website redesign. Throughout the document, my client–an international association–had written, “We need to discuss this internally.” This kind of feedback doesn’t help, I thought. I couldn’t update the site map and get it approved until the client team had their discussion. I felt a loss of momentum.

But then I realized that although my client’s comments didn’t constitute feedback on the site map, they were helpful to the project overall. The client team was signaling that they “got it.”

Some clients nod their heads in agreement when they look at a new site map or wireframe but balk later in the project, when it sinks in that this new way of organizing their content also entails new approaches to producing and managing content. This particular client realized the implications of the new site map. It wasn’t just a new navigation scheme. It represented a new way of working, and also a new way of thinking about their website and its role in the association’s …

Read More →

You’re Not Applezon

When we ask what they want from their new websites, many of our design clients say they want their sites to be like Apple.com or Amazon.com. But why? Most of these clients bear little resemblance to Apple or Amazon. Their websites are primarily meant to communicate and inform, not to sell products. They may have member or customer databases, but they haven’t invested in capturing the kind of customer data Amazon or Apple have.

So what are these clients really saying?

“What is it you like about Apple?” I ask. Usually, they say something along the lines of, “It’s so clean.” They are reacting against the busy-ness and excess of their current sites.

What do they want to emulate about Amazon.com? “We want people to feel like the website knows them.” When we probe further, we find this can mean many things: personalization based on an individual log in, role-based access to content, targeting by interest area, topical navigation, or just plain usable navigation and search. But wanting the website to “know people” is usually a reaction to the fact …

Read More →
Newer Entries →