The simplest question with the hardest answer - what should you put on your website?

For anybody who's ever sat down to work on the content for their website, you'll know that at first, it seems like the answer will be obvious, but as soon as you start digging into it, you realise that it's an open-ended problem; there's dozens of perfectly acceptable solutions to the problem, so how are you supposed to know which one is best? 

This is a real challenge for businesses. Would you like to take a guess as to how many times I've sat down with a business to discuss a new website, and they've said they were perfectly happy with their content the way it is? The next time it happens will be the first time. 

Almost every business has a genuine problem with the content on their website, whether it be too much, not enough, not the right type, it's out of date, or even that it's just plain wrong. Sometimes it's laid out confusingly, sometimes the customers can't find what they're looking for. So how are you meant to ensure that you fix all of these issues, and prevent them from happening again? 

Well, while we can't fix ALL of these problems, a lot of the structural issues with your content can be solved by keeping a few basic principles in mind. Firstly, LESS IS MORE. I cannot stress this enough. If Wally was standing in the middle of a white page, you'd find him pretty quickly, right? The exact same thing happens on your website - the more crap you jam into it, the harder it is for anyone to find anything. 

Next - stop worrying about above the fold. That's how we designed websites 20 years ago. Today, and especially since the invention of mobile phones, people are completely used to scrolling. Jamming everything your website has to offer into the top 700px is a terrible way to design a website. 

Lastly, there are established, formal processes for designing sites and structuring your content. You may not have the resources to embrace these processes in their entirety, but you can certainly learn from them! In particular, the process of User Centered Design shows us how to structure the content on our site around the simplest of concepts; by putting the things that are most relevant to our most important users first and foremost.

By following some basic minimalist principles, and by using processes like UCD, you can move beyond WHAT and answer WHY - and once you understand why you're doing something, you're guaranteed a much better result. 

Assembler is a web design agency based in Perth, Western Australia. This blog is intended to be an informal, behind the scenes look into the web design and development industry. If you like our content, please follow us on LinkedIn or Facebook!