How to Design Compelling CMS Web Pages
When working within a CMS system that gives a lot of freedom, it is important to instill guardrails and best practices to keep designs and content consistent and usable. Using design and content best practices together is the key to making pages more compelling and overall effective.
Good designs are often unseen, they are built with small details that a consumer may not notice, but enjoy. Creating simple and clear navigation experiences, organizing content into well-defined sections, as well as creating consistent design experiences help users understand the website’s goals and intentions.
Page Layout & Hierarchies
Page layouts and hierarchies work together to make a page’s content work for the site’s goals. A page’s layout represents the arrangement and organization of all of the text, images, and graphic elements on the page. Creating a visual hierarchy within the layout helps end users focus their attention and find guidance through the site’s objectives and delivery.
Visual hierarchy concepts and principles like size, proximity, color, typography, and whitespace can be used together to make web pages more effective. Guiding the user’s eye to important elements first, organizing related content together, and creating clear and consistent navigation are easy first steps to building an essential visual hierarchy.
Tips:
- Prioritize important content to be some of the first things users will see or interact with. Page footers are great for giving users a second chance to find links or information they are looking for they may have missed.
- Use of color can make links, buttons and actions stand out; or help users identify related content. Keep color balanced and high contrast for good user experience.
- Make headings and important call to action text larger to draw users’ attention and separate sections of content.
- Negative space, or whitespace, can be used to separate content, emphasize ideas or actions, and even create patterns to help users get to their goals all while creating a clean, consistent presentation. Keeping margins and content in alignment will go a long way to making the page easier to consume.
Content Consistency
Consistency helps create better expectations for users to accomplish tasks. Organizing and publishing content in a cohesive and logical way keeps a page’s messaging, branding, voice and tone, as well as overall quality easier to maintain, and easier for users to understand. Being strategic in planning, aligning business goals, and tailoring content to a page’s intended audience will build brand trust, engagement, and customer satisfaction.
Often CMS platforms have concepts of structured content. Breaking down patterns of content and goals into structured parts ensures content is delivered in a consistent and easier to maintain manner. Taking advantage of templates, reusing layouts, and following defined design patterns makes editing content easier and more streamlined.
Tips:
- Reuse content patterns and cues for recognizable workflows and repeatable tasks.
- Maintain a regular cadence or content schedule. Creating and following a content calendar can help with planning and delivery.
- Be consistent with content headings throughout each page (e.g., a single H1 for the page title, H2s for sections, etc).
- Utilize templates and layouts over individual HTML sections or pages.
Diligence - Keeping Order
Beyond the act of keeping a page’s content consistent is the idea of content diligence, or moving attention to improving quality, accuracy, and ensuring content is valuable and goal oriented.
Holding content to a higher standard of quality, learning from analytics and feedback, being detail-oriented, and persistent are just a few ways to be more diligent and strategic. Each page likely has a goal that serves the site and/or business; keeping a page’s content valuable, trustworthy, and professional is an effective way to drive long-term results.
Wrapping Up
Creating effective web pages and experiences is a culmination of visual design, messaging and content strategy, and effective editor best practices. Staying goal oriented and detail focused drives web pages to be easier to consume and produce results. These tips and principles can be a great guideline for creating better websites and a happy audience.