How a Website is Like Your Garage

A new website is like your garage when you first move into your house—neatly organized, clean and spotless, and full of possibilities. You have strategically placed everything where you want it, and everything fits with ease. A new website, like your pristine garage, requires no struggle to find what you are looking for. You’ve placed “priority items” where they are visible and accessible, and the rest is kept in well-thought-out locations for easy access when needed.

As time goes on, however, you accumulate more and more content, and soon you find yourself with no strategic place for everything to live. Like your garage, the stuff is piling up. You can’t figure out how to reorganize your boxes and are unable (or unwilling) to discard old items you no longer use. You’re running out of space, have lost your organizational structure, and soon you won’t be able to move around at all! Your garage, once tailored to meet your needs, has become cluttered and important content is now impossible to find.

How Do You Prevent a Disorganized Website?

As a company with extensive experience in award-winning web development, we wanted to shed some light on how we prevent this overstuffing. Follow the Boston Digital 's Simplicity Methodology for great web design tips:

REDUCTION

Remove everything except what is truly needed to avoid clutter and achieve goals. With every piece of content ask yourself: Why is this here? What happens if I remove it? Is this relevant? Every item (content, words, images, and treatment) should directly support a user or goal.?For more information on how your site’s content is performing take a look at our guide,?What is a Content Audit .

ORGANIZATION

Categorize and consolidate what remains of your purposeful content. Identify themes and group accordingly to create sections of similar information. This is a great way to conceal similar items behind each other and gradually reveal information.

PRIORITIZATION

Establish hierarchy and patterns for order. Everything should have a place and priority, and patterns should be employed to enforce consistency. Don’t let your garage-hoarding habits extend to your website. Like that brand-new garage, upkeep and maintenance must never stop. But more importantly than anything, you must create a strategic website framework that’s built to scale with your growing business.

Why does all this matter?

The well-known saying, “build it and they shall come” does not apply, you can’t just expect prospective audiences to visit your website and click to connect. Rather, they need to be directed to information that relates to their needs, identifies the solution through the products and services you offer, and validates their decision-making during their search.

By providing a strong navigational structure, you will lead users on a seamless path to key information that eases their decision-making – driving them closer to your brand. Here’s how to do it: