How Does Web Design Impact Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy that is used to generate an interest in a product, service or a brand through the publishing of smart and relevant information. So, how does web design impact content marketing? Written by Marie Boulton, jerram.co.uk. Jerram Marketing is a team of four highly experienced marketing, design and development professionals. Formed in 2006 they bring over 60 years of combined experience and are each highly trained in specialist areas. Image courtesy of Rawpixel.com via Bigstockphoto.

How Does Web Design Impact Content Marketing?

One of the most important considerations in designing a content – heavy site is accessibility. When publishing any kind of information or content, you must ensure it’s easy to navigate to, and read. The design of your website should make the information easy to find without having to click through tonnes of pages of irrelevant content just to find what they’re looking for.
Have you ever gone onto a website and got frustrated because you can’t find what you’re looking for? As will your visitor if they must spend any amount of time actively searching for the content they’re looking for. Creating a straight forward navigation set up with a drop-down menu or a search bar, will improve your websites accessibility tenfold.

You Have 7 Seconds to Make an Impression

Thinking back to times you have visited websites; how have you felt when you have arrived on a scruffily designed landing page? Did you trust the site? The answer is probably no. The age old saying “you should never judge a book by its cover” is not applied to web design. The appearance of your website will be the make or break of your success. Visitors place a lot of faith in well designed, professional looking sites. Its human nature to be more drawn towards something that is well presented – if you had to pick between a scruffy looking solicitor and a well-presented solicitor offering the same thing… we both know who you would choose.

If your site looks outdated or is visually unappealing, users may be hesitant to consider you a valuable resource. You need to have a clean, well presented design that illustrates your professionalism and gives visitors confidence that your website and your business is the one for them.
Along with the overall look and feel of your site, your text and content should be visually appealing too. Some website owners get a little over excited with font choices and the array of colours they can make them. Too many fonts can look unprofessional and be very overwhelming for the site visitor. You should typically stick to one font for the titles and another for the body copy.

Your body copy needs to be clean and large enough to read without any struggle. This might seem as a given, but a lot of people completely forget these details and it can have a major impact on how effective your content marketing strategy is with potential customers.

Don’t Forget the Pictures!

They say all the best books are the ones with pictures in them…well, they don’t, but they should. Because most people are visual learners; it works out in your favour to have graphics and photos to help visitors fully understand new topics and new information. Visual content like photos and videos can help your potential customers get a better idea of how they can use the products or services you offer. From a design point of view, this means the layout of your site should work well with visual content, and make it easy for readers to scroll through photos and watch videos.

These are only a handful of things you need to be thinking about when designing your website, especially when concentrating on content marketing. There is no point spending all your time writing great content if you’re not presenting it in a way which entices people to stay on your page.