Some Tips To Help You Create a Successful Editorial Website

An editorial website is one that provides quality information around a certain topic that is so helpful or interesting that many people continue to reference and cite it as a legitimate resource. Ebony, Vanity Fair, Smashing Magazine, The New Republic, USA Today, WIred, Bon Appetit Magazine, and The Next Web are some popular editorial websites.

If you are planning to create your very own editorial website soon, here are a few tips to help you make it a successful one:

• Be thoughtful when you hire a website development firm for the design and development of your editorial website. Look at the agency’s experience, expertise, team, and finally their work portfolio to see what kind of projects they have handles. To save yourself from a headache, look at their transparency policies. And most importantly, before hiring them, ensure that you’re clear about the kind of theme, content, features, and other things that would go on your website.
• For your editorial website, use a magazine-style theme. These themes make it easy to handle lots of content by allowing lots of articles and posts to be displayed in one place without getting the users confused. These themes allow easy grouping of content by categories to present it in ways that aren’t possible with common blog themes. This would also give your website a look and feel of a larger site.
• Study the demographics (age, location, gender, etc, of your target niche well and tailor the content on your editorial website according to it. It must be unique, helpful, relevant and valuable to your intended audience. Moreover, your website design should also be made keeping your target audience in mind.
• Just like magazines are multimedia rich, your editorial website should also be. Life is a series of thousands of tiny miracles. Why not capture them in pictures? Have lots of bold and big pictures of high quality on your site and do not forget to optimize them well so that your website load speed does not get impacted. Search engine optimization and app store optimization are the integral chunks of the digital world. Don’t miss out on that.
• Be thoughtful when you consider the typefaces that you will use on your website. Use multiple styles of well-designed typefaces with a mixture of fonts that complement each other but at the same time remember to use web-friendly fonts as this would not make your website heavy. Your typefaces must have a reflection of what your editorial website is about.
• Use a grid system on your magazine/editorial website just like traditional publications and magazines use. You can develop a clear structure of the page by using horizontal and vertical lines to display content in a way that looks organized and is easier for users to read and interact. However, you must be sure enough that you’ll be posting a lot of articles if you decide to use grid system on your website. Or it would look like an empty one.
• Make sure to use lots of white space on your website to make it look clutter free and neat. It is truly said that there’s relief in white space for the reader. White space can be used to focus your users’ attention to the important things of your site that you want them to focus on.
• Do a thorough keyword research in terms of your website’s SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Plan keywords according to your research and try using them in moderation.
• Determine who your direct competitors are and analyze their websites to evaluate their strategies and see how well they are able to meet their objective via those strategies. You can also get the feedback of your customers or users on your competitor’s websites in order to know all possible loops and holes and also to find out what they’re doing right.
• Use micro interactions to make everything easier for your users, like a progress bar indicating how much your users have read, tooltips to inform the user about the tab or element they’re in, etc. Use them to keep your users engaged with your website or your website will turn out to be ordinary, just like a million others. Microinteractions are said to increase conversions significantly.
• You can display all the important information to the side of an article in a consolidated manner so that it becomes easier for your readers and also to draw in anyone browsing your site. As Benjamin Franklin has said that for every minute spent organizing, an hour is earned. Why not earn a good amount of time with this trick?