Your corporate website is a complex beast, subject to the whims of management, market-

ing, your own design tastes, and customer feedback. When building or redesigning your

site, it is critical to keep the company’s primary objectives in the forefront of design activ-

ity, and let the form follow the function. It is also critical to consider the best development

platforms, from choosing the right CMS to getting the best deal in hosting. These decisions

set the tone for the rest of the site’s construction, and many future headaches can be

avoided with some smart planning.

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2 CONTENT

2 CONTENT

WEB DESIGN AND MARKETING SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESS WEBSITES

While it would be easy to start this book diving headfirst into design, it would be a dis-

service to the first cornerstone of the Internet: the written word. Text is the Web’s foun-

dational element, from the earliest Gopher servers housing physics papers to the millions

of web pages published through corporate websites, personal blogs, and social networking

domains like MySpace.

Sharing text was the reason the Internet was invented in the first place. Text is searchable,

scannable, and transportable; it can be moved from file to file, program to program, lan-

guage to language. It can be sent thousands of miles in half a second or distributed to a

million inboxes at the click of the Send button. Rarely has a medium fit the platform so

perfectly.

After distilling all responsibilities down to a base level, the core role of a web designer or

information architect is to build an environment that illuminates the content crafted by

copywriters and blessed by the marketing team. The entirety of this book and its ideas all

serve the same grand purpose: to deliver the message of the site.

In the world of corporate web design, this is critical to remember. Many websites feature

elegant layouts and refined typography, exalting the text. But just as often, designers and

marketers overthink a project, and a potentially simple design devolves into a complex lay-

out that actually hinders reading, when time could be better spent writing and editing the

marketing message. For better or worse, the Internet is too often a living case study of art

deco mentality: time, effort, and money spent on embellishing the perfectly functional.

People visit corporate sites to get information. Sometimes they are already customers and

have a question, and they hit the Support section. Sometimes they’ve heard about you, but

need to clarify a few details about one of your widgets, so they visit the Products page.

Sometimes they stumble across your domain by pure coincidence, and browse the About

section to figure out what exactly you do. Whatever the reason, the visitor is going to con-

sume content—video, animations, diagrams, photographs, and, most importantly, text.