This wouldn’t be a real blog without a top 5 list now would it. So here is my “5 ways to inject some simplicity in to your site” post.

1. Simplify site objectives

Its easier to focus on a small number of tasks. This is important to remember during the planning and developing stage. Too many goals for a site and a project will soon spiral out of control without focus resulting in a finished product that is unable to deliver on any of its multitude of objectives.

2. Keep all stages of the project as simple as possible

Too many meetings and technical specs that are too detailed and hard to follow will bog down the development process. I’m no expert on project management, but a good project manager will try to avoid information overload and keep their team focused on attacking the core areas of a project to ensure the main user tasks of a site are addressed effectively.

3. Learn to recognise distraction

Common culprits of distraction are blogs, polls, forums, photo galleries and social media (yes I hate the term too). Some of these things can greatly benefit a company but generally speaking if your sites core focus is selling office stationary and not creating engaging content then a blog is probably going to be a distraction rather than a benefit.

More often than not these “secondary features” exist for SEO reasons. More content on the site means more keywords for search bots to pick up and in turn increase search rankings. But this practice just results in messy unstructured sites that become unusable and fail to get users to convert.

4. Keep control

Every piece of content should exist to help a user complete a task. If you work in a large company with many stake holders, you will need to keep tight controls on who can add/edit content, especially if that content exists in close proximity to a key call to action. Too much copy on a page and a call to action will become increasingly less obvious. As a result your site will become less effective.

Restrictions on editing content should be tighter the closer the user gets to completing a task. Nothing should distract a user from say the final click of a “place my order” button. This is not a place to up sell and inform them about other products and you certainly shouldn’t be showing them any banners. All you would be doing is giving them more opportunity to exit before they buy your product. The deeper a user travels down a funnel the simpler your content an UI should become.

Keeping an eye on conversion rates regularly will alert you to any problems in this area. You can even get Google Analytics to send you an automated alert if conversions drop bellow your normal expected levels.

5. Keep your guard up

You have a successfully simple site with clearly defined business goals and visitors are becoming loyal customers every day. But now you have a new challenge… avoiding bloat. Some new hot shot in the company wants a “new feature”. Even though the site is now live don’t be fooled into thinking the project is over. Be as vigilant about adding new features as you were during the planning stage. If its not core to the business and feels like a distraction for both the user and internal resources then just say no. Keep it simple stupid.

Making things look pretty is a skill that is becoming less important in a world focused on business goals, conversion rates and visitor retention. Clients now have a better understanding of the importance of online and as they become more savy, clients that once valued look and feel above all else are now expecting more from their sites. Sure all companies want a site to look good but more than that they want a site that meets the goals of their business.

• They want to be easily found
• They want to have high conversion rates
• They want loyal customers that return again and again

Designers who only posses visual design skills do not have what it takes to succeed as a web designer. As online business models become more sophisticated, so too has the role of the web designer.

These strategies focus on creating engaging, relevent content which often covers issues such as:

• themes, messages, voice and tone
• content channel distribution (newsletters, RSS etc)
• purpose of content
• content relationships
• search engine optimization

These are all great points to consider as part of a strategy but few strategies cover anything about removing old outdated content.

Out with the old

Good content managers will look to archive old news stories and completely remove out dated irrelevant content. Removing old content can be just as important as adding new material.

Even in companies where a solid content management strategy already exists, old content can pile up unchecked collecting virtual dust. Left unmanaged this content will drastically reduce the effectiveness of a website to meet the needs of a business.

Outdated content can be more visible than you think and will devalue fresh content by making the new stuff less likely to be read. A visitor reading old content is not consuming your new material.

Once a visitor lands on old content don’t relly on them to click through to more relevent information. Having a quick look at a “depth of visit report” in google analytics will tell you what percentage of people only view a single page on your site. Most sites record a high number for this metric. So this potential customer who was shown outdated content leaves the site without experiencing what a company has to offer and is likely never to return.

What stays and what goes

Does a certain older piece of content still provide value to the user? Only a user can answer this but you could have a wild guess. Or, better than guessing look at the analytics of that page. Look at the amount of traffic it attracts, look at it’s bounce rate and where they go to after?

Sometimes completely removing a page can be too drastic. If the page is pulling in good search traffic but resulting in a high bounce rate then modify the content to make it more relevant. Use that page to direct the user to more relevant content that still satisfies the users initial search request.

Dont try and entice a user to visit your site by keeping hold of irrelevant content in the hope that they remain on your site eventually converting. It wont work. Sure it will be an extra hit on your unique visitor metric but at the same time its probably going to help increase you’re bounce rate too.

Once you identify a page that needs removing make sure you also remove any internal links that might be pointing to it. This will ensure you wont be sending users down paths that dont meet your business goals. If you’ve set up good redirects and have good 404 pages, removing pages with outdated content will only benefit the users experience of your site.

Old news is still news.

News items should obviously not be removed completely but efforts should be taken to inform the user that they are reading older content and that there are far more relevant posts he could be reading instead.

Categorise this

If your site deals with categories for products or content then keep an eye on them, control who has the ability to add new categories (not just top level ones) and have a strategy to control the overall size of these categories. I know of sites that have more categories than products. Don’t be afraid of damaging your search engine rankings by removing nonsense categories that capitalise on popular search terms. Your users will thank you for it. If you have categories that are very similar merge them and use 301 redirects to ensure you don’t loose a user to a 404 page.

Removing or updating old content, monitoring your categories to avoid bloat are all steps to help improve the usability of your site. Be ruthless when it comes to removing the old stuff. If you where redesigning a site with the aim of simplifying its user interface then you wouldnt think twice about removing irrelevent visual clutter. And the same applies with content. Outdated content is noise that interferes with the signal, it will become an obstacle stopping your visitors becoming customers.

To learn more about content management strategy head over to A List Apart and have a look at the great content posted under the content strategy topic.

“Monkey Jazz” BEARDYMAN & mr_hopkinson™ from David Hopkinson on Vimeo.

This beardyman fella is just great. Great bit of video work too.

Thanks Dil.

I find my self wanting to do things like this since the arrival of little Tom. “Look Tom this is how daddy got to work before he got his rocket turbo boots”. I’d be really interested to see your journey, get out your camera/phone and start clicking, post a link here for all to see.

What a truly liberating experience it is to know your target audience and build a site with pixel fonts and min/max-width.

Anyway pop in put the kettle on, have a look around and let me know what you think.