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Quality Content Kills Clutter

By Rick Allen on November 10, 2011

Nobody likes clutter. It’s overwhelming, distracting, and a chore to clean up. No, I’m not talking about your office space — I’m talking about your website. All the clutter people have to sift through to find the information they’re looking for.

Web professionals often see "clutter" as a design problem, but as usability evangelist Jared Spool notes, "It’s not the visual design the users are reacting to. It’s the actual content."

Crappy content is clutter. Quality content is valuable.

The key to solving your cluttered website is to prioritize and serve users useful, relevant content that meets their needs.

Spool offers a good reminder to seek out content clutter. Do all your links and images have purpose? Are they valuable?

Clutter is what happens when we fill a page with things the user doesn’t care about. Replace the useless stuff with links, copy, and content the users really want, and the page suddenly becomes uncluttered.

Source: Clutter by Jared Spool, Nov. 4th, 2011.

Filed Under: Archive, On topic Tagged With: audience, content strategy

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About Rick Allen

Rick Allen has worked on the web in higher ed his entire career helping shape communications and content strategy. As principal of ePublish Media, Inc., a content strategy consultancy in Boston, Mass., Rick partners with organizations big and small to drive and sustain bold goals.

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Comments

  1. Jo Marsicano says

    November 22, 2011 at 12:13 pm

    Nicely said. Accurate. Simple. Memorable.

    Reply

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Rick Allen

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