How to unclutter your website: content

Let’s face it: no sane person likes clutter. Imagine for a second having a really cluttered house. You may feel it’s homey, it’s very you, and you could easily find anything in your organized chaos. However, imagine you have a guest coming, and he’s going to stay over. Would you still be proud of the mess?

Websites, even when they are personal spaces, are made to have visitors. Your online guests should be received in a clutter free page where they feel comfortable and most of all, makes them want to stay for a while. The two major aspects of a website get cluttered and messy very easily: design and content. I’m going to cover them separately and break them up in subsections if necessary.

Content

Now that our design is cleaner, we need to make the content cleaner too. This isn’t too hard, but for people who have hundreds of pages of content, it might be a little difficult to let go some pages. Trust me, it is for the best. Not only will you like it, but your visitors will appreciate the clean up. Years ago, most personal websites that I visited had over a hundred pages of content, and it seemed to be the right thing to do, to have tons and tons of content. However, like I have discussed before (but will repeat anyway) - it’s not about how much content you have, it’s about the its quality. As a general rule: limit your site’s content only to what you’ve written yourself.

“About” pages. Most websites have “About me” pages. If you don’t have paragraphs here - it’s most likely to be messy. What do you really want to tell people about you? I’ve found that the best way to do this is writing in full paragraphs, maybe with a very short list with vital information at the beginning in case visitors don’t want to read a lot. A messy way to have the “about me” page is subdivided in 20 more links with things like “what’s in my purse”, “name meaning”, “eye color meaning”, “birth day meaning”, “3259723 facts”, “handwriting”, etc. What’s wrong with these?

Firstly, most of the “_____meanings” are written by somebody else, avoid that. Second, no huge list is going to define who you are. Not the list of things in your purse, or the list of your classes, or the list of things that you don’t like. Some well written paragraphs are the best way to present yourself to others, and that’s all you need. Having too many subpages in your “About me” page means that you still have a lot of unnecessary bulk information there.

Basically the same rules apply to an “About website” page. You just need a few paragraphs to explain it to people, maybe a short list. You don’t need to tell everyone how much space you have and how much you pay. You also don’t need 30 subpages to say everything about your website. If you don’t have more than three paragraphs to write in each subpage, then it doesn’t deserve a subpage. For example, you don’t need different pages for each one of these “About”, “About the name”, “Hosting”, “Site style”, “Site rules”, etc. Nobody needs that many subpages. A way to clean this up is to gather in a single page everything that is truly important, and leave everything else out. Put yourself in the visitor’s place, do you really want to read all these subpages?

The links page. Links sections get cluttered easily. That’s not a reason to subdivide it into different pages! First of all, categorize your links. Ask yourself why are you linking each website. Keep only those links to sites that you really like and that you would really recommend to your visitors. My suggestion is to make a master list of all the websites that you visit daily (or almost daily), and have it under a “favorite links” heading. Note that it is not necessary that you link them with buttons. A link is appreciated even if it is a text link. Text links should be neatly organized in bulleted lists, (<ul><li>link</li></ul>). Links to bigger or corporate websites could be in the same page under a different heading. You don’t need a separate page or space for “affiliates” or whatever you call those special sites you like. Your master link list should be the sites you love, so all your favorite links should go there.

If you have banners / buttons for people to link you with, you don’t need a separate page for them. You can add a separate heading for them in the same page you have your links. Just make sure that you don’t have 9532 banners, four is enough to choose from - unless they all look the same, in that case you only need one! If your list gets too long, it is a good idea to have two columns, because most of the time the links won’t fill the content area’s width.

Other content. Anything else that you add to your website is what it is going to make it unique. That means that your content should be one of a kind. Desperate attempts to make up content result in messy, poor quality pages. If you are going to offer something for your visitors to download, spend some time working on it. Make sure it is 100% yours, which means implies that you are not using someone else’s copyrighted work. It’s hard to do, and if you do it right - you’ll be avoiding all the bulky bad quality content that makes “visitor” sections have thousands of subpages.

Spend time creating your content, you’ll be satisfied. You’ll immediately see how one page makes up for many “half-assed” ones. Also, be really careful when offering reading material. Make sure that everything is written by you, that’s the rule. If it’s one of those tired “reads” that gets passed on and on - take it out. Most people have already read it, and if not, they’ll have it forwarded to their email addresses soon enough. It’s very depressing to see those reads bounce around every other website in the internet. The stories aren’t even that good. It is also wrong to copy articles from magazines or other websites, even if you credit them. If you have some of these, get rid of them also.

Terrible ideas for “visitor content” also include: “guess the _________” riddles, birthday lists, myspace lists, and basically every one of those games made up to “interact” with the visitors.

Now that we’ve discussed what you shouldn’t have. Let’s talk about decent content and how to organize it. So far we know that every single piece of content in your website should be your own, so after you’ve decided what to keep (and maybe even wrote a couple of articles, stories, etc) it’s time to compile it in a neat way. First we need to separate in another page what you have for display purposes only , for example your artwork or your poetry; and what you want to give away for your visitors.

You can devide your “visitor content” in two categories: articles and graphics, if you have both you may list in the same page. Assuming that you don’t have bulks of pointless content, your “visitors” section should be pretty organized.

As for people who offer tutorials, I’ve got a thing or two to say. Look at your tutorials and please ask yourself, do you really know what you are doing? Some websites have huge and messy tutorials sections, mostly full of completely useless tutorials. Before writing and publishing a tutorial, make sure that:

• you know what you are talking about.
• don’t tell people to just “copy at paste” some piece of code without saying what it does.
• you aren’t copying some else’s work.
• your visitors are going to find it useful.

For people who offer services: please refrain from doing so (and specially charging money for it) if:

• you are not a professional in the field.
• it can be easily done just reading a readme file.

I know that sometimes people feel an urge “to help others”, and may incur to writing tutorials or offering services. Some times people do it to increase the website’s content. Whatever reason you have, think it through before doing it.

Generally, when it comes to content, some people tend to overdo it. By overdoing it I mean that they have a lot of pointless pages that just make the website “look” bigger than it is, and inflates the page count. Well, let me assure you that having too many subpages isn’t good; specially when they are all empty! It makes it difficult for the visitor to access the content that could be easily gathered in one or two pages.

Just remember, if you didn’t write it yourself, it is better off gone. In fact, if you ever thought that bringing up your page count was good, you should be convinced as of now that it isn’t always the case. Content only deserves its own page if it’s extensive and worth reading / seeing. If you have an insane amount of pages in your website, consider having a clean-up soon. You’ll have more quality content contained in less pages, looking and feeling clean.