Design or content; chicken or egg?
So, which does come first? In an ideal world, says Olav Bjørkøy in .net magazine, “you should never design anything before you have a clear grasp of the content”.
‘Design before content’ is listed in an article identifying the top 10 design mistakes that web designers make. Bjørkøy goes on to emphasise, “…design for your content; don’t insert content into the design as an afterthought”.
This makes perfect sense to me and links back to the relationship between information architecture, intuitive navigation and effective web design. In reality, however, apart from a vague idea of what information a site will contain, the content is usually the last thing to be signed off or delivered by a client.
Why? Because, like it or not, clients are often juggling many different projects, of which their website is just one. The article suggests that one way to avoid this is to provide rolling deadlines, such as “relative timescales for portions of a site build, rather than specific dates”.
I’ve seen this from both sides of the fence, as a client and as a copywriter for digital agencies. It may work for some businesses but for others, it makes no difference. Many clients underestimate how long it takes to gather information, produce text and sign it off internally, and finally how long it takes to upload and edit once on the site. Tweaks and changes are inevitable.
Design and development teams need to educate clients on the importance of the content from the start. Provide some good and bad examples on good-looking websites to show what a difference it can make. They need to emphasise that it shouldn’t take a back seat to the design, which it often does because many people perceive the ‘words’ to be the easy part.
Quick tip - visualising layout
If, like me, you create copy for clients’ websites, more often than not you will be typing and submitting it in Word (or similar). So, here’s a quick tip to help you see how your copy might look on screen.
In the standard views Word presents your document in, the text is laid out as it might look on an A4 piece of paper. This, of course, is not how it will appear on the website you’re writing it for (I hope!).
To help you (or your client) visualise how the text might look online, use Word’s ‘Read’ feature (usually found in the top toolbar, next to the symbol of an open book).
Whilst this has been introduced to help users read Word documents more easily, it does so by applying some of the principles of good text layout for the web - by reducing the width of the sentences on screen and making the font larger.
Selecting the ‘Read’ view will help you to see how your copy might look on a website and where to introduce paragraph breaks, bullet points, headings and so on. It may also help your clients to see why you’ve done these things too, which can only be a good thing!
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