Content marketing and website design are closely interrelated, and that's a fact. Only when content creators and web developers work together, they can create a worthy product – a website, which runs smoothly.
In this article, you will find tips and tricks, which will help you to match your marketing strategy with design. If you follow the recommendations given, you will take your site to the next level.
Set goals and select a suitable platform
First of all, you should outline your content marketing strategic plan. You should decide what type of content you will produce and in which quantities.
Your task is to set clear marketing goals and find out what type of website you actually need. Do you want to showcase one single product? Create a one-page website.
Are you planning to run a blog and produce tons of content every day? Create a multipage well-structured website.
Depending on your needs, you may start building your website using the following popular platforms:
- WordPress
- Shopify
- Wix
- BiCommerce
- Weebly
- HostGator
Learn more about UX writing
Modern content marketing strategy must be based on three UX principles: clarity, consistency, and usefulness. Yep, today it’s not enough to make your content interesting, informative and relevant. It’s also important to match it with the overall concept of the UX design.
When you craft content for your website, you should follow these simple rules:
- Keep sentences short
- Break blocks of text into paragraphs
- Use active voice instead of passive voice
- Stick to present tense
- Avoid using jargon and rarely-used words
- Highlight the most important points using italic or bold font
Pay attention to content translation and localization
Do you want to develop an effective website for diverse international users? If your answer is “yes”, then you should take content translation and localization seriously.
The simplest way to change the language of your website is to embed an auto-translate plugin or utilize Microsoft Translator Widget. But the problem is that if you translate your content automatically, it will sound impersonal. Even worse, some of your ideas will be misinterpreted because of poor translation.
But in fact, there is no need to translate the whole site. It's enough to translate core content. You just need to create a separate section of your current website, add new items to the main menu and name them correctly: Español, Portugués, Русский, etc. In other words, you should create a place, where you will publish localized content for non-English speakers.
If you want to avoid problems, you should better delegate localization to the professionals in the field. You may visit PickWriters, a translation review website, and choose the most reliable service.
Choose an appropriate color scheme
The color scheme of you your website is an important element of the design. Naturally, the shades choice should also match your content marketing strategy. For instance, if you are going to use a red font on a black background, make sure that text will be readable.
The bad color and font choice hurt users’ eyes and scare them away from your website. It results in an increase in bounce rate and, as a consequence, lowering chances to get your site to the top of search results.
Keep in mind that you should also analyze whether the chosen color scheme will fit visual content. For instance, if you create a portfolio website for a photographer, who shoots in black and white, you can’t use green-and-pink background. It will look weird and incongruous.
Compress images
In the past few years, everyone talks about the importance of visual content. And it’s not a surprise that content managers tend to overuse big media files such as high-resolution images and videos.
The issue is that websites, which contain a bunch of visuals, load slowly. And it irritates the impatient users. Modern people don’t want to wait more than three seconds to see the whole page, so they leave a website and never revisit it.
The major task of web designers is to compress heavy files to make them usable. It’s the easiest way to boost load speed and retain visitors on the page.
Create a chatbot
Today, chatbots can perform lots of different functions, including content distribution and delivery. If your site is overloaded with tons of content, you may create a chatbot, which will guide visitors through your website.
When working on this task, it’s really important to coordinate actions of content creators and web designers. It’s necessary to make sure that they understand each other needs and work towards the common goal. Only matching content marketing to web development, it’s possible to create a bot, which will work effectively.
Put mobile users first
The volume of mobile traffic is growing, and it has already surpassed a share of desktop traffic. Naturally, most web designers are aware of this trend. They use responsive designs to ensure that mobile users will not experience any difficulties while surfing the pages using their smartphones.
There is no room for doubt that that responsive web design is a great solution for most websites. However, it's not the best solution for content heavy sites.
If you publish lots of videos, photos, and article daily, you should better choose a mobile-first design. It's the only way to ensure that your website will load fast and runs smoothly on smartphones and tablets.
The great news is that mobile-friendliness is one of the most important criteria of Google ranking. So if you choose this type of design, you will increase chances to get your website to the top of Google search.
In conclusion
As you can see, content marketing and web design always go hand in hand. And you can’t ignore this fact. Try to apply the advice given, and results of your hard work will positively surprise you.
And remember one important thing. If you have a lack of knowledge in content marketing, don’t hesitate to get professional assistance. Let a marketing guru guide you through the content creation process, so you will be able to design an outstanding site.
