Trust. There’s no better philosophy for adding content to your site than the mantra: “Use words when you must.” Trusting in your design to speak for you is the best practice when it comes to site content.
Take, for example, this image of the helicopter disrupting the sky with its power and almost mysterious elegance. Your imagery and overall design process should interrupt your site visitors and make them feel something about your company. It should be striking and commanding. It should communicate more than words.
Who you are, what you do, why you do it, and where your passions lie should all be evident at some level in the design of your site. Showing your users your values through visual cues will invite them to become a living, breathing part of those values. Words are factual but visuals are engaging. This is what design is for.
The next few blog posts will focus on these questions:
Why is design important for my site?
I’m not a designer. What can I do?
How can I utilize expert advice?
When this blog series is complete you will feel more equipped to use the best design resources for your company. You will be well-informed and ready to trust your designer to help you develop the highest quality of content that your company deserves.
And thanks to Will Keeler, we hope to show users the power of great imagery.
Images communicate an idea so much quicker than text does. I agree—using compelling images that strategically communicate to your visitors will work wonders for your site.
“Use words when you must.” - Now that’s a great design principle! Too many websites end up coming out like sales letters rather than elegant interfaces for achieving a specific task as efficiently as possible.
This is one of those things all of us need help doing from someone outside of our business/project, because we’re always so tempted to just throw a bunch of words out there since that’s the easiest thing to do, since God-forbid someone misses every last detail of what it is out company does. The truth is, nobody cares about our site as much as we do.
Just make it easy for people to get what they want and leave ‘em be!
Great article though.
Ha. Doron, your right. I don’t even care about what our company does half the time.
Haha, ok, see, I *know* what I’m talking about!