Content

Introduction

The term "content" refers to the information and active functionality of a Web site.

Information

All sites provide information of one sort or another, whether that information is purely functional (like a train timetable), intended for entertainment (like a story or a humourous article), or somewhere in between (like a cake recipe, which although it has function is also likely to provide enjoyment).

Active functionality

Some Web sites are active, as well as simply providing information. For example, ecommerce sites allow users to place orders for goods, and many sites include a forum area where visitors can contribute to discussions about the site or its subject. Charity sites allow people to donate to their cause. Sites for musicians might allow musicians to upload their works, and allow others to offer positive criticism.

Deciding on content

You probably have a good idea of the basic content that will be included on your page. But, in order to create a good Web site, you should consider carefully what people will want in case there is useful content that you didn't think of initially.

Organising content

Content should be organised according to a clear structure which users can understand.

Target audience

Before finalising any decision about the content of your site, it's important to consider the people who will be reading it.

Breaking down this target audience into several groups helps you to work out whether your planned content matches up against the needs of the audience.

Categorisation

Try to divide the people who will use your site into different categories. Begin with any obvious groupings, then divide those further. The trick is to divide your audience into types that will need slightly different things from your site.

Depending on the topic of the site, different ways of dividing your audience might be useful. Some general examples are:

• Experience with the site's topic
• Experience with the Web in general
• Disability (blind, deaf, can't type, can't use mouse, etc.)
• Nationality or location (Europe, North America, Asia, etc.)
• Language
• Disposable income
• Political beliefs
• Sex
• Age

What to consider

Not all the categories I suggested above are useful for every site. In general, you should probably pick three or four important ways to divide users and work with those.

There are two main reasons for considering a certain division irrelevant:

• because it doesn't make any difference
• because your site isn't intended for that type of user

Consider a site which provides a technical reference to a computer programming language.

Based on the first point above, you would not generally need to differentiate based on the sex, age, political beliefs, or disposable income of your users. They will all want the same content regardless of these factors, so those categories can safely be ignored.

As an example of the second point, your site might be designed for experienced programmers and you are not going to include content for novices, so that division might also seem irrelevant.

However, when you exclude users like this, you should be sure to keep it in mind during the design process. Your final site should inform users of these categories that they are not catered for here, and preferably give some suggestions as to where they might go instead; if you like, you could consider this as one small piece of content for those users. (In the example site, this might result as a link in the front page such as 'This is an advanced resource. Beginning programmers should check out The X Tutorial instead.')

Example types of users

We'll take another example: a site including cake recipes.

The basic site audience is:

• People who want to bake cakes

This can usefully be divided into the following (overlapping) types:

• Experienced cooks
• Inexperienced cooks
• People from the same local region as you (i.e. those who live in Britain)
• People from elsewhere in the world

Some other common ways to divide users are not helpful in this case; for example, it doesn't make much difference whether users of that site are male or female, or whether they are rich or poor.

Users of your own site

Revising content

Having worked out what kinds of people you expect to be using your site, you need to ensure that your content is suitable for all of them.

Writing down initial content

Begin by writing a brief list of each piece of content that you plan. Try to include everything that you intend to put on the site, even things which might seem trivial like a page of contact details.

For example, the cake recipe site might include:

• Cake recipes
• Photographs of the finished cakes
• Brief biographical information about the site's creator

Considering user types

By considering each type of users in turn, you can improve your planned content. Put yourself in the place of each type of user, and look through the list of content to see whether it is suitable for them.

Here are some common questions to ask yourself about each type of user, and each piece of content:

• Is the content relevant to the user? (If not, it might be necessary to provide more content suitable for them, or to give up support for that kind of user.)
• Will they understand it? (If they might not, can it be made clearer, or can background information be provided?)
• Will that user be left wanting additional content that you don't provide, even though it seems (to the user) obvious that you should?

If some content isn't of interest to any of your user types (be honest), don't include it on the site.

Example changes to content

In the cake recipe site, considering inexperienced cooks helps to come up with the following additional content:

• A grading of the recipes by difficulty
• Explanation of technical terms used (e.g. the technique of "beating" a mixture)

Considering international users suggests the need for:

• Some way to convert measurements between your preferred units (metric or British imperial) to units used by other important parts of the world (metric or US imperial).

It isn't always necessary to actually create all the required content - it should be possible to find a conversion chart or utility program somewhere on the Web, so a link to that would be sufficent.

Revising your own content

Feasibility

In an ideal world, you would simply take the revised list of content and go create it. However, some of the content that users will want may be impossible to provide.

There is also the issue of competing sites. If there are other sites providing basically the same content, how will yours be better?

Unavailable content

If you cannot provide some of the content that users will want, you need to consider the best action. You could:

• link to the content elsewhere
• continue as planned, but without that content
• stop trying to cater to that user type

If you continue without the content, you need to be sure that the content you do provide for that user type is sufficient for them to get something out of your site.

Competing sites

If another site provides exactly the same content as you are thinking of providing, or better, then unless there's something particularly wrong with that other site, there's no reason for you to continue.

An awful lot of Web sites suffer from "ok site, but this other site does everything that it does, and more" syndrome. There's really no point in having these sites on the Web at all.

Organisation

Once you have decided on the content of your site, you need to work out how it will be organised.

A clear logical structure helps users to understand the site, which means they can more easily work out where they are and where the content they want is likely to be found.

Simple structure

The simplest structures involve dividing the content into a few different sections. Small sections may end up as a single page of the site; larger sections may end up as multiple pages.

For example, the cake recipe site could be organised into the following sections:

• Recipes
• Glossary
• About the author

Hierarchies

For larger sites, it may be useful to have more than one level of sections. For example, if there are a lot of recipes in the site, you might want to divide the Recipes section into several subsections:

• Sponge cakes
• Fruit cakes
• Chocolate cakes
• Other

This is a hierarchical structure. For a more complex example of a hierarchy, consider this site itself:

Other structures

There are other ways to structure sites. For example, a site with a daily comic strip might have a structure based purely on date. Some sites might even use a customisable or AI-based organisation, where content is actually reordered by the computer to best serve each user. But structured hierarchies are most useful for simple sites.

Planning a structure

You should plan the organisation for your site (for example, how to divide your content into sections) carefully.

If you plan well, it should be clear (both to you and to users) where each piece of content will be placed.

You can divide content into sections based on users or based on the content itself, or both.

A good plan can cope with additional content.

User-based

Sometimes it can be useful to divide content based on the different types of user that you identified.

For example, you might create an entire introductory section of the site, which contains all the content planned specifically for those with little experience of the site topic.

A company site might divide its content into information for customers and for shareholders, since these two groups are likely to want very different things from the site.

Content-based

Content-based organisation simply means dividing your content into sections based on some properties of the content itself. I used this form of organisation when I planned the different sections for recipes on the cake recipe site.

Clear

Make sure that the way you divide content is clear and not arbitrary. You need to understand it, so that you can allocate content to the exact section; but users also need to be able to understand it, so that they can work out where content will be within your site.

Sometimes it can help to consider each type of user from your list, and make sure they will all be able to understand the way you've divided up the content.

Built to last

The structure of your site will not be easy to change, since many other aspects will depend on it. Because of this, it's important to get the structure right first time.

Make sure that your structure is flexible enough to cope with change. For example, try to think of any content that you might like to add to the site after it is finished; would that fit sensibly into your structure?

Your own site

Case studies

There are two sets of case studies which you can use to study content and its organisation.

Content

These case studies are intended for analysis of content. You can go to the site (by clicking on its Web address below) and try to evaluate its content. If you're not interested in the site's content yourself, try to imagine yourself as one of the types of user who would be interested.

Try to come up with good and bad things about the site - vital content that's present, and content that isn't there and should be, or is there but shouldn't be. Also, try not to critique the site in general (for example if it's ugly or hard to get around) - at the moment we're specifically examining the content it provides.

Once you've looked at the site, scroll down this page to see my brief comments. This is subjective, so I might have missed things you spotted, or might have criticised things which you don't think cause a problem.

Organisation

In this case you might like to check each case study and, rather than trying to decide how good it is (or even how good its organisation is), just analyse exactly what kind of organisation they used.

None of these sites really use a simple hierarchical organisation, so they can be a bit of a challenge to analyse.

Summary

The content of a site is its information (what users can learn from the site) and functionality (what users can do with the site). It is the most important factor that determines whether a site is useful or not.

When you plan content for a site, it can be helpful to consider the different types of people who will visit the site. You can ensure that your content is relevant to each group of people.

The content should be logically organised into sections (or some other approprite structure). You can organise it based on the different types of user, or based on the content itself. The organisation should be clear so that users can understand both where they are in the site, and where the information they are looking for will most likely be located.

References

Relatively few Web design sites discuss the importance of content or its organisation. Those that I found are linked here. These may not be directly relevant to you, but they might be interesting to read nonetheless.