6 Cool Ways to Design Info-heavy Content on Your Website

6 Cool Ways to Design Info-heavy Content on Your Website

So you’ve got a bunch of great content and you you want to include it on your website? Great! Whether your content is in the form or whitepapers, infographics, or just quality information, publishing it is a great way to engage users and maintain their interest over time. But driving people to a website that handles all of it poorly will make all of that content production for naught.

But fear not, there is a way to include all of your content on your website. You just need to be smart about the way you do it and design it in an aesthetically pleasing and easy-to-navigate manner to ensure that users have a great experience and actually take the time to consume what you’ve created. To get you off on the right foot, here are 6 ways to design a website heavy with content.

1. Use Whitespace to Your Advantage

You might be tempted to fill up every last bit of real estate on your website with content, but doing so will only make all of that great content blend into a massive blob of indecipherable text and images. Leaving a good amount of space around your content will do two things:

  • It will draw more attention to each piece of content
  • It will make viewing your website easier on your visitors’ eyes, meaning they’ll be more likely to stay and actually digest your content.

Whitespace is your friend when it comes to designing any website, especially one with a lot of info-heavy content. Give your content room to breathe and you will have a much better chance of users actually finding it and consuming it. Find out more about why you should use whitespace in web design here.

2. Develop a Solid Visual Hierarchy

Chances are, you have content that is stronger than the rest, or that you want to give special attention to. You can communicate which content you consider the most important on your website by creating a visual hierarchy, with strong visual and textual cues, varying images sizes and fonts.

There are numerous ways you can communicate the level of importance to your users through visual hierarchy. For example, you could place your infographic at the top center of your page with a big, bold headline over it to let visitors know that this is something they should definitely check out.

By utilizing a strong visual hierarchy, your site visitors won’t have any doubt as to what content they should check out. Use things like image sizes, placement, headlines, sub-headings and more to structure your content and you’ll draw attention to the right content.

3. Make it Easy to Search

Every visitor to your website is unique and will be interested in different content; a CMO will likely be interested in different content than a project manager, for example. Because of this you need to make your website easy to search and your content easy to find.

There are a few ways you can make your content easier to search. You could, for example, incorporate a real time search bar that provides users with a list of relevant content, guiding them and providing them with the exact type of content they’re looking for. You could also tag your content with specific keywords and/or add customizable filters to ensure your info-heavy content isn’t passed over.

Nobody wants to sift through a mountain of content to find the one piece of information they’re looking for. Make your website easier to search and you’ll get more eyeballs on your content.

4. Incorporate a Rotating Carousel or Image Slider

No matter how good your content, visitors won’t want to scroll down endlessly to find the infographic they’re looking. But how do you get a lot of content on a page without loading your website up with a countless amount of different web pages?

Image sliders and rotating carousels can help you get a lot of good content on your web pages without using too much of your precious real estate. Frank Kasimov who is the director of Business Insurance Quotes and uses rotating carousels says, “visitors are able to click through a series of relevant content without the need to click on numerous pages or scroll down your page forever. It’s a win for us because we get the content we need out there without sacrificing too much space on our website.”

5. Go With a Grid

You don’t want visitors to get frustrated when they come to your website looking for quality content. A good way to ensure your site has an orderly feel is to incorporate some sort of grid format.

A grid style can help your website attain a clean and neat structure that users will have an easier time navigating. For example, you might arrange infographics and other visual content in one column, blog posts in the next column, and so on.

6. Incorporate Rollovers and Click-to-Expand Elements

Like carousels and image sliders, rollovers and click-to-expand functionality can help you provide more content while taking up less screen real estate.

Rollovers allow visitors to see a small amount of text when they roll over an image. You could, for example, include an image of an ebook with a rollover that provided a brief overview of the book. Click-to-expand functionality is similar, as it keeps content hidden until the visitor actually clicks some sort of call to action.

Conclusion

There are an infinite number of ways to design your website to include info-heavy content. Due to the unique nature of your business and the content you publish, you will need to access your specific needs and goals first and then use this information to design your website in a way a way that highlights your content in a smart, easy-to-navigate manner.

Incorporate some of the ideas above and you will be able to include your rich content library on your website and ensure that it has the chance to actually be found and consumed.