How to Organize Website Content

How to Organize Website Content

Did you know that 73 percent of companies invest in web design to help themselves stand out from the competition? While you might not think learning how to organize website content is important for your user experience, it is.

But how can you go about organizing your own to make it simpler for your visitors?

Create a plan that helps people quickly find the content they’re looking for. Make your website easy to navigate and even easier to search. If a user is looking for a specific article, you want to ensure they can find it on the first try, and a decent organization plan is going to help them do just that.

We’re here to help you get started. Read on to learn everything you need to about how to organize website content.

Why Should You Worry About How to Organize Website Content?

We’ve told you that it should be easy for users to navigate your website, but you might be wondering why. In short: it has a huge impact on user experience.

When your website is confusing to navigate, it’s difficult to accomplish anything — whether you’re trying to shop, read articles, or look through other content that might be available.

Having a good layout for your content, however, is going to make it easier for users to explore, and it’s going to make them want to stay longer. This is good for your website traffic, your bounce rate, and especially your search engine rankings (Google takes a lot of these things into account for its rankings).

1. List Out Pages

The first place you should start when you’re organizing your content is by creating an information structure. Your website content is typically going to be separated into three parts

  • Pages
  • Categories
  • Posts

The pages of your website are going to stand alone, and are typically going to hold only basic information, but have a clear call-to-action. Pretty much the only way to access these pages is by clicking around the menu. Examples of pages include the “contact us” and “services” pages that a lot of websites have.

Categories are going to be the thing that organizes your content. For a basic blog, you’re usually going to have categories like these:

  • Lifestyle
  • News
  • Business
  • Arts
  • Cooking

These are going to differ greatly depending on your niche, but the premise stays the same. These categories encompass the main components of your website, and then you might even delve into subcategories. Cooking, for example, might have these subcategories:

  • Recipes
  • Reviews
  • Restaurants (if you’re a local blog)

The list goes on for these, but from there you’re going to have your content (or posts) divvied up among the categories.

2. You Need Clear Calls to Action

You don’t want a website filled with dead ends. In order to make the most of the content you’re producing, you want everything to have a clear goal attached to it. This is going to help guide your reader through your website, and it’s going to ensure you have visitors on each and every one of your pages.

For example, if someone is on the “About Us” page of your website, then the next natural step would be to take a look at your services. From there, you can guide them to the “Contact Us” page if they have any questions, or over to your products page if you sell goods online.

To achieve this, you can go back to step one and assign each page you have a clear call-to-action.

3. Critical Content Goes First

This step kind of takes information structure into account, but now you’re actually going to be assigning your content different roles using a principle called hierarchy. You use it to make sure the most important content goes first, and that it’s the thing getting the most attention on your website.

Visual hierarchy is important because it lets visitors scan your website, making the entire process easier of finding what they’re looking for easy from the beginning.

Say, for example, you’re creating an outline for your “About Me” page. You would probably start with a header acting as the title, and then move into a section explaining your story, and then you might have another one with your services listed. That last section could then be filled with hyperlinks to the “Services” pages of your website so readers can get more details on what you have to offer.

4. Move to Grouping Related Content

From there, you’re going to move your blog posts and other content. You should start grouping your related content together so it can all be placed into different categories and subcategories.

This is perfect if you’re brainstorming blog ideas or articles to add to your website because you can have a visual of your categories, subcategories, and then the content that’s going to be placed within those. If you want to move even further with this step, you can pick calls to action for each piece of content.

You can also save that step for last. As you start getting more content, or as you start writing your copy, it’s going to be easier to create calls to action.

5. Gather Your Copy and Visuals

When you’re gathering your copy and your visuals, you’ll also want to create a hit list of things you’ve already covered. While it isn’t necessarily bad to cover things more than once, you definitely want to ensure you’re spacing those posts out before you start repeating or updating them.

The other big thing to remember here, however, is to remain consistent. It’s going to make your website easier to navigate, and it’s also going to help your brand appear more trustworthy to those who are doing business with it.

If your text and visuals are consistently inconsistent, then you’re always going to drive traffic away from your website. So, come up with your own writing style, and then ensure that your content is consistently written in that voice.

6. Think About Your Target Audience

When you’re designing your brand, content, and even your writing style or voice, it’s important to place a focus on your target audience. After all, they’re the ones who are going to be reading and exploring your content the most often.

If this is your first time writing for a target audience, you can start by mapping out a few different things, the most important being your ideal customer. Here are a few questions you can ask yourself:

  • How old are they?
  • Are they a certain gender or do they have certain traits?
  • Where do they live?
  • Are they in school or have they graduated?
  • Do they have children?
  • Do they go out a lot or stay home on the weekends?
  • What are their hobbies or interests?
  • Are they active?

The more specific you can get with your answers the better. This is only going to help you continue to create content that’s relevant to the people who are most likely to read it.

7. Test Things Out

Once you have a target demographic and a plan for your content, it’s time to begin building and testing things out. You can track your website’s visitor count to see what visitors are viewing the most, or you can even keep things simple and just ask your following.

You can hop on social media and conduct polls, ask questions, or even leave space for reviews to be left. You can also conduct individual interviews if you’d like.

From there, you redesign if you need to and continue the process as many times as possible.

8. Optimize From There

Once you’ve tested, you have to figure out what you’re going to do with that information. If you’ve redesigned already, then you probably have an idea of what’s working and what isn’t. Now, you’re going to work to optimize your website based on feedback and any numbers you have available to you.

As you move forward and create more content, creating processes or taking feedback into account when you’re working on certain things is going to get a lot easier, and you’re going to be able to move forward a lot faster.

Create Your Web Content Strategy Today

Now that we’ve gone through the basics of how to organize website content, it’s time for you to get started. Whether you’re starting a brand new website or you’re redesigning the one you already have, this guide can help you through the entire process.

It’s best to pick this guide up before you start building anything, but if you’re redesigning a website that’s already filled with content, then we can help you there too.

Take a look at our plans to get started today.

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