Meta Refresh 2016

While UI/UX has grown popular with transactional websites, informational websites have largely relied on visual communication design. This typically translates into a collection of page templates with clear visual hierarchy, good typography and tasteful aesthetics. However, the visual design aspect is merely the tip of the design iceberg and needs the support of a robust strategy around structuring information and presentation to deliver a great user experience. Through this talk we will explore the iceberg that remains underwater — from architecting information, to achieving balance between flexibility for content creators and control for designers. We will walk through a content-first approach towards designing and scaling informational websites, be it a portfolio or company profile website, or a densely populated publishing platform.

Outline

• Introduction
• Audience, Context and Goals
• Organising and Structuring Content
  • Identifying Content Types and Modelling
  • Information Architecture
  • Establishing Relationships
  • Navigation and Way-finding
• Capturing Content
  • Separating Content from Presentation Formats
  • The Role of a CMS
• Presenting Content
  • Design Systems vs Pages
  • Identifying Design Patterns
  • Achieving Authoring Flexibility vs Design Control
  • Facilitating Content Discovery
• Closing Thoughts

Speaker bio

I am a co-founder of Miranj — a web design studio in New Delhi. We architect information and design radically simple, future-proof websites. When not writing code for the web I enjoy backpacking, music, coffee and food. Of late I’ve been experimenting with standups and barefoot running.

Links

• http://souvikdasgupta.com
• https://hasgeek.tv/metarefresh/stream/495-overexposed
• https://hasgeek.tv/metarefresh/2014/849-web-is-flux

Slides

https://speakerdeck.com/souvikdg/architecting-content-driven-websites