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The Intersection of Web Design and Content Creation
The Intersection of Web Design and Content CreationAndy Crestodina comes to us from Orbit Media in Chicago, a 15-year-old web design company, where he works with clients and serves as the CMO (Chief Marketing Officer).
Andy’s extensive experience has proven that simply helping people to build websites without helping them populate those websites with content was not a complete service. As a result, he developed a content marketing department that helps clients not only build great sites, but fill them in such a way that the content and design support each other.
Too many writers, he says, don’t understand white space and visual prominence—how words and images fit together. Orbit Media remedies this by requiring the designer and content marketer collaborate closely. This allows the content marketer to create content that fits the space as well as providing the designer with clear direction as to how to make it all fit together seamlessly, guiding the visitor’s attention through a series of steps and pages.
Andy talks to us about everything from do’s and don’ts of web design and content creation strategies to the value of “the missing stat.”
In This Episode
- Why you should do your own research
- How to keep visitors on your site
- The flow of a well-designed site
- Why conferences are so important
- Building the “Wikipedia of your industry”
- The value of the missing stat
Quotes From This Episode
“If you’re publishing a ton of evergreen content that’s relevant for a long duration, you can drop the dates because what you did is exactly what we all should do—create the mini version of Wikipedia for your industry. Wikipedia doesn’t have dates, right? They’re writing just useful stuff. They’re answering important questions.” —@crestodina
“It’s a blind spot for a lot of marketers. They’re just working hard on the next blog which might get a few hundred or thousand visitors, but they might have pages that are crushing that every day and they may have dozens of visitors at this very moment on a service page that they haven’t looked at in months or years.” —@crestodina
“A few rock star posts every few weeks will crush a medium-quality, daily, just-another-blog. It’s like pouring water into the ocean. The Internet is not waiting for another blog. Produce something great. Make it something that you would brag about to your mom.” —@crestodina
Resources
What did you want to be when you grew up?
As a self proclaimed nerd from the 80s, Andy grew up a gamer and avid comic book reader which led to his interest in that intersection of technology and art. He says, “Having loved the multimedia of just words, pictures, and comics, it evolved into animation and interactivity which evolved into analytics and measuring results from creative and technical projects. Combine that with just caring about people and loving to teach, and you end up as a content marketer in a web design world. And there is nothing on this planet that I would rather do than what I’m doing now.”