Content Presentation Options for Your Utility Organization
If you’re ready for a website redesign, one of the main points of focus will be how the final product will look. Your site design should showcase the best parts of your utility organization, and there are plenty of ways to make it “feel like home”—with everything from local photography to a custom illustrated footer.
When it comes to choosing and presenting content on your home page, our design experts will help create the best home page hierarchy for you and your site visitors—but what about your internal pages? Let’s take a look at some ways to build and present content for the web pages that live a bit deeper in your site.
Standard Migration
Opting for a Standard Migration during the Powerful design process does not mean your content goes untouched. Some of the best practices we’ve built and implemented on every site include making sure site content is accessible. The basics include spelling and grammar checks as well as optimizing links and images.
For most sites, we try to ensure that each global navigation item doesn’t just have a dropdown list of page links but is a destination page unto itself. These landing pages are equipped with more prominent graphic tiles as opposed to traditional text hyperlinks, which allows visitors with mobility issues to have a bigger target when trying to aim for a page.
If some of the images on your website are functional in nature, our content team will add clear but succinct alternative text, or “alt text”. This alt text allows site visitors utilizing a screen reader to gather valuable information that would otherwise only be available to those who are not visually impaired. When creating text hyperlinks, consider links as a “call to action” and use descriptive text like “Sign up today” to eliminate any doubt about where the link will lead. This can help all site visitors, but especially those who are visually impaired. It’s also important to label documents, like PDFs and Word documents, with the file extension. This allows site visitors to know whether to expect a new tab to open or whether a file download will be initiated.
The Powerful Standard Migration is a good option if you have team members already designated to read, rewrite, or optimize content further. It’s also helpful if you are still ironing out the details of your web content. As part of the Powerful implementation process, we offer training webinars on content strategy and optimization so that even if you aren’t prepared to overhaul your content, your team can be better equipped to update and manage fresh content for the long term.
High-Touch Migration
The main focus during a High-Touch migration, also known as optimization, is breaking up the wall of words. There is certainly good use for narrative writing style, but most of the content on your utility website is more educational and informational. While continuing to implement our best practices and accessibility standards mentioned previously, we also read through the copy and break it into subheadings whenever possible. Plain Language is the recommended standard for the web, and it helps us to reach our STAR Standard.
Converting content from sentence form into bulleted lists helps increase readability. Clear heading choices and lists allow site visitors to find exactly what they need, even if it’s further down the page. When a page contains only paragraph formatting, it can be challenging to find the specific information you may be looking for. Both headers and bulleted lists allow easier scanning for all site visitors, especially for those who live with dyslexia or other learning disabilities.
Taking the time to strip out the “fluff” allows higher readability for your site visitors, but it also makes updating the content much easier long term. When content has been simplified through a High-Touch migration, editing the page with new information or statistics becomes much more manageable.
Content Visualization
If you’re ready to double down on your website’s content strategy, you can craft powerful messaging by taking your content to the next level. Content Visualization is a customized approach that marries content and design on a by-page basis. Even if your content is still a wall of words, we’ll take what you’ve provided and incorporate visual elements to enhance the page in a way that fits you best. Important information can be emphasized, common elements can be balanced, and your bulleted lists can receive the royal treatment with unique icons tailored to the content.
This hand-crafted approach was built on the knowledge that most humans process visuals better and faster than text. Visuals could include images and icons, but the page’s overall design is built with a real understanding of the content. Your call to action can now be easily recognized and understood in a way that would be difficult to convey with just text.
A great companion to these unique site pages is a Powerful UX Package that includes heat mapping and analytics reporting, as well as stakeholder surveys, and can even incorporate remote user testing. This UX package can be utilized both before selecting your Content Visualization pages and after site launch to see how site visitors interact with your new content.
Specialized Content Visualization pages are an excellent opportunity to reimagine your content and make your website refreshingly different. It shows intentionality when communicating with your site visitors and creates unique, memorable online experiences.
STAR Standard
Regardless of which content migration option you choose as part of your utility website redesign, implementing our STAR standard and best practices whenever possible is part of the deal.
STAR stands for:
- Searchable – making sure your site content can be indexed by your site’s internal search tools and by search engines like Google and Bing
- Translatable – equipping your website with automatic translation tools that instantly convert copy to your site visitor’s chosen language
- Accessible – ensuring compatibility with assistive technology and incorporating design elements that remove barriers
- Responsive – building design and content so that it can automatically adjust to various screen sizes or display types
Rest assured that when choosing a Powerful website, you can expect that we keep your utility organization and your site visitors top of mind when working through your website content during your website’s design and implementation process.
