Top Practices For A Feature-Rich Website

What Should Stand Out?

Before anyone designs their content-heavy website, one should always keep in mind the features and content that needs to stand out. They should consider the order of the content and the pieces that reflect the website’s primary purpose. Here are some of the steps that you can take to push your website to the frontline:

• You need to first determine the content that you want to present. We advise you to separately plan the internal pages, homepage, and other special pages.
• You also need to cut, alter, and revise the pieces. You need to ask yourself if you want to feature everything present above. Content-heavy websites tend to have a lot on every page. We advise you to keep all your features purposeful.
• We encourage you to organise every content piece in a list that is based on hierarchy. You just need to focus on putting every feature in an ordered type of list. It can be from the ones that deserve more attention to the least noticeable.

Getting Client’s Content

This tip is essential if you are dealing with a feature-rich web design. With all the content-heavy designs, it is crucial to collect the website content before designing and wireframing starts. The content might be readily asked upfront the majority of the time you work with clients. However, you can still expect multiple changes in content later on. A simple typo might be easily corrected for limited space within a design. 

However, it would get a lot harder if the change of content is shorter or longer than the previously planned one if the design sticks that content to a specific space. For getting the customers to dedicate a final content copy for the website instantly, you need to first explain the importance of affecting the design and having it right away with the client. For the most part, a simple explanation and agreement are sufficient for a customer to instantly plan the final content.

Fitting & Organising Things

Now you have the final content after brainstorming and also organising the required content visual order accordingly. Implementing it into the website is the only challenge that’s left. Here, wireframing is crucial for any design procedure; however, this stage for a feature-rich site should require longer time and planning.

Hierarchy: Typography and Layout

Multiple feature-rich sites mainly organise contents by trying to keep things simple. These sites also use the visual hierarchy power for leading the customer’s eye on where it is required. Multiple factors tend to influence hierarchy, and that includes visual weight too. However, the majority of the content-heavy sites with extra features prefer to go the easy route. It creates a hierarchy with strong typography and content placement in the layout.

The bigger sections are organised amongst the small ones. The sections present closer in proximity to the top left to receive more attention than those present in the bottom right. For visual hierarchy placement, it is best to follow the F pattern. We also advise you to define and organise the content sections based on importance through typography. Plus, the text colour, bigger font sizes, and additional unique fonts can influence the visualisation of a feature on a site.

Grid-Like Design

Utilising and sticking content to a grid consists of an excellent method for maintaining tons of content organised. It can also keep content visually and physically separated. You can utilise either set rulers or a grid framework whenever you design a content-heavy page. You need to organise where the data will go. The padding and marginal rules should be consistent at all times in the grid.

Directory & Page Structure

You need to come up with a detailed sitemap for the content-heavy sites. You need to determine the connection of pages in the sitemap. It is important to determine how they need to start interacting with one another. You should also determine the content that needs to end up on a single page, including the content that needs to be separated. The directory structure goes hand in hand with the page structure too.

If utilising a blogging platform and other types of CMS for organising the content, then the directory structure might not be your problem since it will be automated. The directory structure planning or setting up the custom site structure is a part of the design stage. You need to consider it whenever you design and work with developers of the site for coming up with a page structure and directory plan that you and the designer can work around with.

Techniques

There are tons of techniques that can be utilised for allowing developers and web designers to fit more content in without having to distract the design. You can use a few of these methods:

Displaying on Click or Hover

The majority of the websites are following this technique. It only displays the features or content on hover or clicks. For instance, the feed update forms of both Facebook and Twitter have an input field. Once you click and activate it, the other options and “Send” Buttons tend to pop up. The applications surrounding this method can easily get creative.

Tabbed Content

It is another simple way to hide or display their content during a reader’s request. It is most popular in the side widgets and features related content amongst the tabs for improved navigation. But some entire sites are tabbed. The tabs are also utilised for creating an information flow from the left tab to the right tab. They act as an excellent way for separating content into different steps for the readers to navigate easily.

Showcase Sliders

Showcasing grouped, featured, popular, or recent content is a super popular feature for most content-heavy sites. It acts as a great method for getting readers to search throughout the site’s content. It gets them involved in a great way. However, it can be a design disaster to have more than the needed content on one single page.

You need to enter the content sliders’ age that is featured. The majority of the content like tabs can be added inside a single area. Plus, the readers can choose according to their interests. The sliders can provide extra interactivity and also animations for grabbing attention, along with automatic scrolling.

Drop Down Menus & Content

There’s nothing new about drop-down menus to the web. However, we are locating a lot of drop-down content and detailed navigation menus nowadays. Building detailed drop downs involve utilising intelligent and proper styling + markup whenever necessary. Plus, you can also utilise imagery and event content in the drop-downs.

Collapsible & Removable Boxes

Content areas that don’t need staying, like new feature suggestions and alerts, can take an exit during the reader’s request. Content areas, model boxes, and alerts that can be reduced or closed are great examples. Allowing the reader to hide, display, and fully exit out of the content proves to be user-friendly. Enabling the readers to get rid of the specific content section, which is vital to the website, will allow them to focus easily on interesting things. It will lead to increased action and interaction.

Final Thoughts

Designing for feature-rich websites doesn’t have to be hard anymore. The one challenge that multiple designers find hard would be locating a place for things that adheres to rectify or correct design and hierarchy principles. But it is possible to show or hide the content temporarily. Plus, the content, which is displayed at all times, can be organised easily in a grid-type fashion.