IA Summit 08: Content Page Design Best Practices
Content Page Design Best Practices
Luke Wroblewski
www.lukew.com
This was an amazing session. Luke clearly laid out some of the best practices for laying out content to fit the diverse ways in which people arrive to your site. The examples were clear, and the difference between bad and good were stark. (notes limited, see slides)
We optimize websites for the traditional tree structure, where as the web lives in a more random way. Using his website, he showed how only 5% of people experienced his site in the traditional tree structure, versus coming in via direct links, tags, etc.
Web Ecosystem:
- Communication
- Display Surfaces
- Content Creators
- Content Aggregators
- Search
Communication: IM, email, twitter, mailing list archives, etc.
- Direct communication, personal suggestions, etc.
Display Surfaces: Profiles such as Facebook, Yahoo Mash
- Spaces that you define your interests
Content Creators: Blogs
- Posting original content
Content Aggregators: del.icio.us, digg
Search: Google, Yahoo!
- Most crucial
This ecosystem shows how people may come to your site from many different environments. What happens when they arrive at your page?
A basic page is broken up in 3 different areas, Content, Context, and Related (see slides for layout relation)
Content:
Set good expectations
- HTML & Page title should be the same (consistency)
- Make good on promise of content, % of page dedicated to content should be significant (versus examples showing only 25%)
- Utilize visual hierarchy to manage attention (scanability, bullet points, white space)
Related:
- Showed BBC as a great example, that when searching for a story on the Iraq war, the left side becomes populated with related content. They even embed related video content in the actual story. But can be overdone, similar to the WebMD example for children's health.
- When given too many choices, the easiest choice is to not choose (the back button). Limit options.
Best Practices
- if you an make good on content promises, people are more likely to welcome related calls to action
- post related content on the site, based on the search that brought them there (his site is an example)
Context:
- This is the menu bars, etc. Make minimal
Slides coming soon
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