Design Websites like a Publisher
Whether you’re a business owner or have a career other than “doctor” or “lawyer,” you’ve probably come to realize how hard it is to talk about yourself to clients, friends, or potential customers. Talking about your company in the context of a website is even harder.
When developing any type of creative or content for an audience, it is a necessary skill to look at things from perspectives outside your own. Taking on the persona of a publisher early on in the development of your website redesign can help you create something with lasting brand impact.
Taking on the persona of a publisher early on in the development of your website redesign can help you create something with lasting brand impact.
If you’ve worked in the publishing industry, you know that marketing your content begins in creating it. Every article has a strategy, a promotional plan, a target audience, and a purpose.
This is something we learned early on as publishers of Citygram, and the editorial philosophy we established there guides all of our work today.
Here are five reasons why thinking like a publisher can help you create a great website:
1. People really do judge books by their cover.
If you’ve ever picked up a magazine from a newsstand, you’ve experienced the power of marketing. Great publishers know how to draw your eyes to their magazines – whether it be through celebrity, familiarity, or knowledge in a niche subject matter. With this in mind, great web designers design with intent, and should be able to grab your attention in the first three seconds you visit their site.
Imagery, along with the essential elements of color, type and overall layout, gives emotion and purpose to its content. Similarly, effective websites use imagery and text real estate strategically, to best utilize their screen space to tell a story and establish intent for the product, service, or business. If the design and marketing decisions align with the target audience AND the website features intuitive navigation, there is a greater chance of a sale or conversion on a website.
2. Content hierarchy matters. Guide your audience to what you want them to see.
If you saw the Oscar’s last year, you saw the cringe-worthy La La Land and Moonlight announcement flub.
Titles, subheads, section headers, pull quotes (like this one), sidebars – these are all elements that help a user read and understand the content.
When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced that La La Land won best picture, they were actually holding the announcement card for Best Actress (Emma Stone).
But can you blame them? Look how little importance these cards give to the actual award. If the Oscar award card had better content hierarchy, “Best Actress” would have been in large print at the top of the card, not a footnote, and the announcers would have caught it before making such an embarrassing mistake.
Titles, subheads, section headers, pull quotes, sidebars – these are all elements that help a user read and understand the content. For a magazine, each page is an opportunity to draw a reader into an article or publication. For a website, each page or section is a chance to get the user engaged. Your message needs to stand out, and be understood clearly and quickly, for you to gather attention.
The way we quickly consume and interact with Facebook feeds, and other scrolling content on our devices, makes the importance of establishing dynamic and attention-grabbing elements on a page even more critical.
3. A great Art Director can tell the best stories.
It’s hard to imagine Vogue without Anna Wintour. Similarly, it’s hard to imagine the work of Anna Wintour, without stylist and creative director Grace Coddington, and the many number of photographers and artists they worked with to create the iconic imagery the brand has come to be known for throughout the years.
Photographs (and/or illustrations) are often the most important visual elements of any website, and creating compelling imagery that speaks to your brand or business does not happen by accident. Whether it be your team (or bio) photos, or dramatic lead image that says what your company does in one image, a great art director can not only conceptualize the vision of your brand’s story, but she also knows how to assemble the creative team of artists and photographers that will make it come to life.
4. Don’t underestimate the power of a good edit.
Great marketing copywriters know how to get their message across concisely, and with as few words as possible. A good edit can sometimes be the difference between a good story and a great story; an article that’s read and shared, versus one that’s glossed over.
The headlines and subtitles to the content sections of your website shouldn’t take these opportunities for granted.
A good edit can sometimes be the difference between a good story and a great story.
A test we like to employ on our site designs to check our success is to imagine taking all the images out of the web design. Does the text alone tell the story? Likewise, we imagine taking all the text out. Do the images explain what your company does, how you do it and give the consumer trust or connection to your product or service?
Back to the point of how people consume content these days… First, we got used to reading 144 characters for a complete story on Twitter. Then, we had to digest an entire story through one square image and (maybe) a caption on Instagram. And then, we had to do the same thing, but only if we saw an image before it disappears on Snapchat.
You must only include the most important information about your business, and do so in a way that captures your audience’s (very short) attention.
Now, on Facebook, Medium, LinkedIn, etc., people are sharing stories they come across based on their captivating headlines, and more-often-than-not, are sharing them without even reading the story at all. This is the attention span we’re working with online, y’all.
For websites, this means you have very little time to get someone’s attention, therefore you cannot include long-form articles with every detail of every thing you’ve ever done. We call that “Too Long, Didn’t Read.”
You must only include the most important information about your business, and do so in a way that captures your audience’s (very short) attention.
5. Get in front of your audience.
Finally, it’s all about access. Your great content (or website) has to get in front of people, and publishers pay for that visibility through distribution. Facebook (and Instagram) give any size business the opportunity to get in front of today’s consumer through News Feed, and to quote the New York Times, “If it’s an exaggeration to say that News Feed has become the most influential source of information in the history of civilization, it is only slightly so.”
Often, our clients ask us why they should choose to work with an agency vs. a freelancer when designing their website. We tell them that it is because we aren’t just web designers.
We aren’t just web designers. We’re storytellers.
We’re storytellers with experience conceptualizing and developing a brand’s story. As publishers we often work with and assemble teams of photographers, writers, editors, designers, illustrators to successfully bring stories to life on printed pages. As web designers, we do the same thing for all our clients and their websites.
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