Content-driven Website Design


When Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable type press in the fifteenth century it became possible to mass produce books. This lead to the spread of information and ideas all over the world to large amounts of people. This was the beginning of the enlightenment period and it significantly changed the world. The emergence of the Internet had a similar effect. No longer did you have to be published in some sort of book, magazine or newspaper to have your ideas spread all over the world. Anyone with an Internet connection could share their ideas and information with anyone else who has access.

One of the most popular communications methods on the Internet is the World Wide Web. A World Wide Web page resembles an electronic version of a book page or magazine layout. In fact web pages are designed and laid out just like books or magazines in a way that hopefully makes them easy to read and pleasant to look at.

Web design is big business and there are thousands of web designers out there who can create your web page. Often the process for creating a web site involves multiple proposals being submitted to the client with potential looks and feels of what the website is going to be. Colors and fonts that are associated with the content are used and a layout with an easy to understand and use navigation is designed. This goes back and forth with the client a few times until everybody is happy.

The biggest pitfall in web design is forgetting that content comes first. Without something interesting to say, people are not going to remember your site or return to visit it. Flashy gimmicks and bright colors are no substitute for good thought provoking ideas. Having said that, at this point any Flash or JavaScript that needs to be created is handed off to a programmer to create and fit into the site. Also the page is converted to HTML which is a text based formatting language for display on web browsers.

Next a web host must be found and they usually charge a monthly fee based on what sort of features your website needs like extra bandwidth or back end database processing capabilities. Once all this is done, and good content is inserted the site can go live. Content will ultimately drive people to your site but some people consider SEO or search engine optimization techniques essential marketing for getting your site to come up with a high ranking on search engine queries.

By: Daniel Blinman