Organizing your content

Now that you have completed your planning, it's time to organize and develop the content that you are going to display on your website.

You probably already have a good feel for how you want to structure your website,

Your goal should be to keep the information well organized, but yet easy and intuitive for visitors to find what they want. The easier your website is to use, the longer users will stay at the site, and the more they will see of it.

If you keep your website goals in mind while designing your navigation, it will be much easier for you to grow your site logically in the future.

So how do you accomplish this? As you develop and write your content, look for logical groupings of information and let that guide your navigation. For example, all of your company information, such as about the company, history, press releases, and partner information all are logically about the company as should be contained in the main category of "About Us". You should be able to accomplish the same thing with the other content you want to present to your visitors.

Organizing your image portfolio

One of the challenges you will ultimately faces is how to organize the imagery for your website. We’ve seen them done by season, location, subject matter, eco-system, and even by date. Simply put, there is no right answer – it depends on what is in your portfolio and what imagery that you want to share.

A recommendation that we normally make to our clients is to pick a sampling of various aspects of your work. It will present a more rounded overall collection that will interest a broader range of visitors than if you focus your entire gallery deeply on one thing. This approach also lends itself well into rotating in and out new imagery without throwing off the balance of your work and rewards repeat visitors of your website by being able to see your latest work. It also reinforces the fact that your site is active and continuing to evolve.

What really is paramount is to choose quality over quantity. From our experience almost no one looks at all of the images on an artist’s website. Thus what you really want to do is put together a collection of you’re “A” quality images to showcase to visitors. Don’t confuse this with “all” of your quality images. You want to hold some back to swap out imagery without dipping into your “A-“ pool if you for whatever reason are unable to get out to take some new images.

In addition, if a publisher or collector should visit your website asking for your library of images on a particular topic – you’d like to be able to offer then additional options other then just what is currently viewable on your web site.

Writing your content

When you get down to writing the individual pages of content, make sure that each page deliver valuable information to the readers. Your visitors must get what they are looking for, whether it help them satisfy the whole reason why they are doing the search. Any artwork that is displayed must be complementary to your overall message. Remember, laying out a page that is pleasing to the eye does not give you an excuse to not deliver the information that a visitor is searching for. Websites which are focused on displaying artwork portfolios have their own unique challenges because the product is almost entirely visual. A skilled website designer should know how to handle this unique situation.

As you write your text, be sure to use a word processing program such as Microsoft Word so that you can spell check and grammar check your writing. It is also advisable to have several people review it before providing it for inclusion in your website. Nothing can kill your credibility faster than poor spelling and grammar.

A word about fonts on the web

Web fonts have a great subconscious effect on the impression your site gives to visitors. Is it formal or casual? Modern or traditional? Serious or friendly? Warm or cool? These feelings can be conveyed instantly, even if the visitors may never consciously notice the Web fonts used on your site.

You can specify any font installed on your computer, but if you stray from using the standard fonts that everyone has installed on their computers, the viewer won't see your fonts as intended.

The following are what are considered the "safe" fonts to use on the web:

• Times New Roman
• Georgia
• Arial
• Helvetica
• Verdana
• Tahoma
• Comic Sans MS