You have good quality content ready for publishing to attract your web visitor’s attention or even kickstart a content marketing campaign. But wait, there are a few questions you must first answer before publishing.
Have you checked your web design? Will it match your content type and format? Also, how easy will it be to find and read this content?
Good web design and content are two codependent sides of the same coin. The coin, in this case, is content marketing. You cannot get the best from your content marketing strategy without aligning the two.
Here are the things good web design ensures to help your content do what it is intended to do.
1. Better Engagement
The main goal of content marketing is to encourage audience engagement. A good web design creates a user and content-friendly site that boosts content engagement. There are various design tips you could follow to promote engagement.
One is using design elements that evoke emotions from your potential customers and inspire positive user action. The best elements to achieve this are fonts and colors. For instance, a color like red has the power to drive action and encourage engagement.
Performable’s call-to-action button was proof of this. The red button outdid the green button by 21%.
CTAs are also some of the best strategies to encourage engagement and achieve content-wise business goals. This is because they stand out on web pages. A good web design allows you to embed CTAs in your content to encourage desired user action, as shown below.
Finally, people are more likely to engage with your content if you include interactive design elements like a comment section on the page. They encourage real users to leave questions and feedback about your content.
2. Easier-to-Understand Content
Users will only interact with content that is easy to follow and comprehend. A good web design ensures this is possible by providing options that make it easier to present these different pieces of content.
Visual designs such as infographics, memes, and videos simplify content, making your products or services easy to understand. Most people are visual learners, which means they need compelling visual designs like the one below to understand the content fully.
You can also use words to simplify concepts. For example, in this Buffer blog post on work blueprints, you see that the brand included a relevant example of a work blueprint. Although there’s a picture there, a bulk of the sample work blueprint is text:
Allow enough white spaces between the original text and the visual/text you’re using to simplify concepts. That can help direct the reader’s eyes to the visual/text, which can help them understand the main content better.
3. Better Reading Experience
You have your user’s attention as long as you provide content with good readability. This applies to all your website content types.There are also various website design practices that ensure a good user experience for a great reading experience.
One of these practices is ensuring that you carefully choose fonts and colors to use from your web design software. To provide a better user experience, you could use different font sizes and colors for the content body and headlines, like in the Zendesk example below.
Another good web design and content creation practice is contrasting the real content colors to your website background and non-text content. This makes it easy to read the content. Zendesk’s well-contrasted homepage is an excellent example of this:
A good web design also provides a better and more enjoyable user experience through content structures and formatting. Through the use of mobile responsive layouts, headings, bulleted and ordered lists, your content is transformed into easily digestible content blocks.
4. Improved Aesthetic Appeal
Your web users’ first impressions matter. You could have great content but have the lowest engagement and conversion rates if your design is not appealing.
A clean and simple design helps you get web visitors’ attention and trust easily because your design is proof of your professionalism. The Adobe Creative blog is an excellent example of such a design.
The page uses white spaces and content boxes, giving the website a more spacious, clean look. It also uses high-quality product images that appeal to the reader.
5. Easy Content Access
Your efforts to ensure your web design and content is appealing are all in vain if web visitors cannot find the content. This is usually the case for websites publishing large amounts of content. A good web design ensures that content is easily accessible.
Your website navigation should be built in your web visitor’s best interest, like every other element of your design process.Here are a few web design features you could add to better your user journey:
- Drop-down menus – Expanded navigation gives access to more of the site’s pages
- About us page – Build trust by providing an overview of the company’s offering, backstory, and staff
- Search function – Help the user quickly find relevant pages, articles, and blog posts
Here’s an excellent example of a website that ensures content access and findability.
As you can see, the website utilizes well-designed drop-down menus, making it easy for users to find content under specific categories. With such a design, you can also keep your web pages neat.
In Closing
If you have yet to align your website design and content, it is time to do so. There are various ways your content benefits from a good web design.
A good web design helps simplify content for easier understanding and ensures a better reading experience. It also improves aesthetic appeal and makes content accessible and available for web visitors.
Get a good web design for your site, and see your content reach new heights.
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