Content Centered Design - Web Design Tips

the idea of content centered design this is I don't know if this is a popular term this is a term that I'm thinking about but it's it's basically designing your websites your web applications your web pages around the content that's you know given to you a lot of times when folks are starting out in web design one of the things you run into as you try to you think big but you don't have the content available to you so you might have empty pages you might have pages on your website that doesn't have enough content in it and what happens is your web start your website starts to look a little bit not complete it looks you know amateur and it's a problem and it's a problem that I faced early on when I was starting out

so one of the things that you want to do is you want to think about the content that you have available to you before you start designing anything so if you're talking to a client and they're asking you to design a page for them and if the content that they give you or the content that you have available to you let's say is an image or a paragraph and that's all you have from your client then all you really have to go with is a one-page design wrapped around that one image and that paragraph okay there is no need for additional pages because you don't want to get into a situation where you have a website with so many different pages and so many tabs and so many links and when I click on that link there is a coming soon sign or there's an under-construction sign if you don't have content for the services tab don't put that tab on your way say if you don't have content for a blog if I click on the blog and there's nothing on the blog and in on the recent post or anything like that get rid of that tab and when you do come up with enough content that's when you want to then add that tab back to your website so when I when I speak of content and I teachers to my members in my training course is that you content consists of images and text is the the marketing message it's the text that your client you're the producer of that website wants to convey to their audience so that consists of the marketing message the body text and all that stuff and the images the imagery so it's your job as the designer to work with that product manager that small business owner that client to to get them to work with you on what type of content they want on that website is really their job to kind of provide that to you but you need to encourage them to think about what type of content they want on the website because it's hard for you to design something without content your site is very flat and it ends up looking not engaging so some of the things that I try to do is I try not to design anything without first discussing what type of content what type of imagery what type of text words content data that I have to work with and what's going to happen is when you start to think that way as a designer is going to do a couple of things one you'll start to to design more functional practical looking websites because the design is centered around the content and two it's going to allow you to kind of break that creative block because when you don't have content you're you're sort of in a in a zone where you don't really know where to go and what to do but when you have the content now you have ideas and you can go on the web sites and look at other websites on how they laid out the same type of content and then you can apply it to to your your designs another thing that I wanted to touch on is when you when you have the content one of the things that I encourage all my members in my training course is to go out there and use other sites as a guide of reference to your design so I like to the analogy that I like to bring up is think of a painter a painter when he paints a tree or when she or he paints a tree for the first time they're sitting out there in the woods in the jungles or whatever and they're looking at a tree and they're painting that tree and based on looking at what type of you know the tree it is so they're they're painting it and they're looking they're keeping an eye on that tree and that's what I like to sort of to bring in terms of web design you want to do the same thing so each every part of your website when you have you know a section or a collection of content and you don't know what to do with it you want to take that same content go out there on the internet and browse other websites and look at how they laid out that same type of content and then you want to apply that same look and feel to your web designs.