Darren of Problogger recently wrote about How to Decide How Many Columns are Best for your Blog. A blog is also considered a website to me. Just that it’s a genre of its own.
I like the way Darren introduced the problem along with the solution in his life experience. He began telling the story of how a salesperson selling wardrobes wanted to make a deal with him and his wife. The surprising thing was the salesperson didn’t show them a catalogue and told them the great deals offered now.
The salesperson instead started with questions of function.
To help provide a functional solution, the salesperson looked at the amount of items in the wardrobe. Like Darren said, how we wished bloggers would sometimes think of things this way. And I can’t agree more when it comes to normal websites.
So let’s mimic what Darren’s salesperson did in order to accomplish a functional solution for his wardrobe except we’re going to apply it to our websites or blogs.
We need to identify the more functional components that we can’t live without. The point of this part being bolded is because as much a list you can write about the things you want to put on your website, you need to narrown down to the more important components most of your users would find handy.
After that, we need to categorize the components into its rightful section. For instance, ads by Adsense or Chitika, a list of recent entries, a list of affiliates or friends should probably in a category titled Extras. It’s best to do this on paper first. When we’re happy with the categorizing, we just decide how many columns we’d need.
Oh yeah, but do remember. If your website is more about the content, give enough priority to it like how Darren’s commenters left in their comments. :)