Have you ever heard someone say “don’t judge a book by its cover”? Well, they’re absolutely right – especially when it comes to designing for the web. In contrast to a book, designing for the web raises a much more complex dilemma: we don’t have the reader’s undivided attention and we’re often telling more than one story. We’re addressing several different readers with different needs through the same medium.

In reality, web designers have they’re work cut out for them. It’s not as simple as creating a pretty template and plugging some content into it. The design itself is an outcome of the content. We’re essentially creating a framework for communication and messaging.

Our work in web design is all about the content. The visual design is intended to effectively deliver and support our content. So to judge the quality of a site, you really have to judge it by it’s content. Next time you critique a website try to answer these three questions:

1. Who is this website serving?
2. Why are they coming here? (specifically, what is it they need to do?)
3. How does the site inform the reader or guide them through a process?

Who is your website serving?
A lot of our upfront design research is dedicated towards understanding our users and segmenting them by the types of tasks they need to accomplish so that we can derive mental models and personas. One key benefit of doing such research is so that we can get the right content to the people who matter.

Why are readers coming to your site?
Remember that we go online for a reason. It could be to learn something, such as reading an article, to achieve something, such as checking Facebook, or simply to be entertained, such as playing an online game. No matter what, we visit sites for one reason or another. We need to write our content and structure our design to facilitate these motivations. Your readers came to your site to do something; get to the point.

How is your site informing its readers?
It’s still all too common to see brochureware. These sites are organisation centric and are chock full of information that tends to be informative but irrelevant to the user and their task. For example, if you’re in retail chances are most people coming to your site because they want to buy something or find out how to get to your store. They don’t care about staff policies, or how the business was founded twenty years ago, etc…

Taking content and copy seriously
It’s all too common for design teams to only consider full fledged GUI’s as interaction design. Email addresses and even the URLs your website use are forms of interaction and need appropriate amounts of attention. Remember the golden rule…the shorter your text is, the more important it is to design text for usability.

Think about short text in your design. Are the terms you’re using to describe each section in your primary navigation correct? It’s critical to get this right from the get-go.

Designers can spend hours on the colour, drop shadow, and font-face used on a button. But more important than all of those things, even its placement/positioning, is what the label on that button says. If a user notices and reads your call to action but doesn’t understand what it means than all of that effort was pointless. This is not to discount art direction, visual hierarchy, and aesthetics, but rather to put them in their place. You need to know what you’re saying before you get into any of those details.