Moving Content Into Your Website

I caught myself saying the phrase ‘moving content in’ several times the other day; I was referring to moving content into a website – I guess like, moving into a new apartment or a new house. (Fun fact: The frame of the house in the picture was the beginning of the house my parents designed and built-in suburban Chicago in 1990.)

As much as I moved as a kid (seven times before ninth grade), I’d never used that expression - moving content in - before until that meeting with that client.

BUT – seriously: that’s exactly what it’s like.

Designers build and create wireframes, and we move content in. I guess in that sense, content is like furniture - it fills the space and sets a tone in ways that are then, in turn, supported by the bones of the house.

Which is why I offer this advice before you ever move any content into any website:

1. Does the content match the design, or – better yet – does the voice match the design? Have you ever been in a colonial home with modern furniture? Weird, right. How’s mismatched content on a website any different?
2. There’s content, and, then, there’s voice – voice dictates content, sometimes literally. Does the voice match the design and the imagery? If it’s a bold, brazen, firey, short, staccato voice and you have beautiful, ethereal images, that’s a mismatch.
3. Does your website designer talk to and/or engage with your copywriter or brand strategist or are they just ships passing in the night? If they’ve never spoken to each other before, get them talking to each other – they’ll support each other better than you realize AND their brains work together better than you think as they’re both most likely visionary and big-picture thinkers.
4. Your copy should mirror your company’s core values – you can’t attest to transparency and then deliver content that’s tight and restricted and awkward. I always recommend an outsider reads just a snapshot (probably just one or two) web pages to see if they get the jist of the company or brand, and then I recommend someone closest to the company reads the exact same.great follow-up questions to those readers' observations?

• What’s similar in the observations? What’s different?
• Did the causal observer totally miss your core values? Or at least one of them?

If anything in abundantly clear here, it’s that the process of website design and content should be treated with the same care, concern, attention that you’d give your home and the items you put in your home. Yes, they have to match the general spirit, but they also have to invite someone else in to stay awhile – or at least long enough for them to put their email on your newsletter distribution list and enter the sales funnel journey with you.