As a web designer do you design your websites around the content your client is going to use to communicate his or her message and make useful information available to its visitors, or do you first create the design and then want the content to fit into that?
If you’re doing the latter, you are not alone, and you’re also denying your client the ability to provide enough information to his or her customers and clients.
No matter what is the business, ultimately it is the content that generates leads and sales. People need to know what you stand for. They need to know what your product or service can deliver. They want to be able to trust you and they can only trust you if they can find the right information on your website.
Sure, when they come to your website for the first time they may get impressed by the design and layout but eventually they will look for the information they need. By merely focusing on the layout you are not going to be able to sell.
So whenever you are designing a website, take into consideration how your layout is going to accommodate the written content, whether it is on the homepage or other pages.
I myself have gone through such experiences. There are many clients – especially those who have purchased a ready-made template – who want me to fit content into the template no matter if on one page they can just have a single paragraph. No harm in having single-paragraph pages by the way, but what if you need to say more? We are not talking about Twitter where you always have to use 140 characters. Sometimes people need to know more. For that you need to publish multiple paragraphs.
This is why, no matter how attractive your design is, unless it is able to scale according to the content you want to publish, it is of no use. Whether you are a web designer or you are purchasing an off-the-shelf template, make sure that the layout accommodates content sections that can expand vertically to accommodate as much content as possible. Don’t use a design that does not accommodate your content well.