Creating responsive content

For both new and existing websites you will need to look at the content carefully and consider if you need to:

• Reduce the amount of content you plan to publish.
• Split one big piece of content into smaller pieces.
• Change the format of the content.
• Remove content from the (existing) site.
• Publish content elsewhere, like a blog, partner site, social media or the intranet.

Content prioritisation

In order to fulfil your user needs you will need to carefully prioritise your content.

On a desktop more content is visible without scrolling than on a smartphone. If users don’t instantly see what they want on a desktop they can glance around the page to find it. On a smartphone users may have to scroll endlessly to discover the content of interest.

To begin prioritising your content: 

• Think about the goals/business objectives of your website.
• Make a list of the necessary content to fit those goals/business objectives.
• Check all this content fulfils a user story.

If your site is there to provide information:

• Think about the order in which people need to learn about your topic.
• Visit some similar sites and think about how they’ve arranged information on their site.
• Consider what seems to be missing or is hard to find on other sites and correct those deficiencies on your own.

You can use card sorting to figure out the most intuitive way of organising that information. Put summaries of your site content onto index cards and then let users sort that content into what they think are the most logical groups. See the guidance on user stories to help with this.