Updated: Nov. 10, 2025
Originally Published: July 29, 2024
Perfect vacations require smart planning. You can spend months choosing the best location with the most fun activities and the ideal hotel, resort, or Airbnb (with a pool, of course). And then all the planning pays off! Great vacation! And on budget!
Building a new website requires that same perfect-vacation level of planning. But think of it as planning a vacation for your site users. You want to make them happy they visited your site.
How do you do so? Long before site launch, nail down content and layout in order to guide users to the information they seek without a hitch. That’s where content design comes in. Content design can help create a holistic, user-friendly experience that leads to repeat visits.
What Is Content Design?
Content design is the art of gathering and presenting website content in a way users find intuitive, pleasing to the eye, and easy to navigate. Your site, like a five-star resort, must be designed to anticipate and meet the needs, preferences, behaviors, and expectations of your visitors.
Architects and interior designers play big roles in the success of vacation destinations. Likewise, a skilled website designer sees to more than typography and imagery. Great web design runs deeper than visuals – it structures, prioritizes, and supports your content at every step to create a seamless experience. Design runs deep below the surface of the website. A thoughtful, balanced design smooths the user’s flow through your website and promotes greater engagement. The designer guides the transformation of each page into a cohesive, interactive experience.
Content Heavy Design
Some sites are content heavy; the main task is to convey a ton of information without overwhelming users. Some sites house limited content, but that content must pack a punch. In both cases, expert strategic content organization must make every piece of information readily accessible and helpful. That’s what transforms casual browsing into trust – and trust into action.
The Role of Content Migration
Packing for a trip involves more than simply bringing the same clothes from one place to another. You definitely don’t need a down coat for a trip to Miami in the summer. And you wouldn’t pack shorts for a trip to the Midwest in the winter. Which is exactly why bulk-migrating website content without considering its relevance and alignment with user needs can frustrate visitors by leading them to irrelevant information.
Recognize that your users are constantly growing and changing, and they expect your site to grow and change with them. How do you keep up with them and the moving target of the tasks they wish to carry out at your site?
Ask them.
Simply talk to them about your current website. Users will tell you if they don’t understand the navigation, can’t find the content they need, or have to click through too many pages to get to their destinations. Use that feedback as your roadmap – it points directly to what needs restructuring. Combine it with UX research to validate decisions and guide improvements. Read more about UX research and its role in content design.
The Pitfalls of DIY Content Design & Migration
Many businesses choose to handle content design & migration themselves to save costs in the short-term, but this often leads to long-term problems.
Internal teams tend to reuse the layouts and navigation structures from the previous design – the very ones that frustrated users in the first place. Change can feel uncomfortable, but user feedback and analytics data are your reality check. A neutral professional will put users first when managing the content design; employees accustomed to old practices and unsure about incorporating new ones might not.
That neutral professional will dump the down coat from the Miami vacation and make sure the towels, swimsuits, and your toddler’s favorite blankie DO get packed. In website terms, that means purging obsolete information and old styles and making sure that relevant, current content and the fresh look and navigation prevail throughout the site.
The moral: Cutting corners on content design and migration might save money upfront, but it can cost you in lost credibility and conversions later. Users who to struggle to find relevant content or encounter broken click paths lose trust quickly, even on a beatiful site.
The Benefits of Professional Content Design & Migration
The look of your site matters. But how the design works with your content is more important. It can be hard to envision new ways to display your content after looking at it the old way for years.
A content designer can bring that new perspective and easily identify the style updates needed to better display valuable content categories that weren’t considered in the existing design or in the initial phases of the redesign. They help align your brand story with your users’ goals, ensuring every page supports engagement and conversion.
Make sure that your designer has the expertise to tailor content layout and migration to the needs, wants, and convenience of your users. Professional content designers bring their expertise to bear in these key categories:
- Content Layout: Strategically organizing information to guide users and boost engagement.
- Cohesive Narrative: Creating a seamless flow that builds brand identity and user confidence.
- Scalability and Future Growth: Anticipating future content needs and evolving strategies.
- Continuous User Flow: Preventing dead ends in the click path so users always have somewhere helpful to go next.
Professional content design isn’t just about aesthetics – it’s about creating a functional, scalable digital experience that drives results. A well-planned website adapts with your business and continues delivering value long after launch.
Need help with content design and/or content migration for your site or an upcoming website project? We can help! Reach out to us to learn more.
