What order to put things in

Now that you know what’s going on your homepage, it’s time to look at what order the content should go in.

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When it comes down to it, this part of the process is all about knowing your priorities. It makes sense to start with the most important elements at the top of the page, and have elements in decreasing priority order as you go down the page.

There are three things that can slightly complicate this:

  1. The competition between things that are important to users and things that are important to the organisation
  2. What you want to have on your homepage might need to change periodically or seasonally
  3. Every team wants the top spot on the homepage

To overcome this, you need to build a case for why each element should be there, and why some elements are more important than others.

At this stage you might be talking to lots of stakeholders, and at this point in the process it can be very tempting to just give in and have 20 content elements and a 5-screen carousel. Stay strong, don’t give in. This is why stakeholder engagement early in the process and regularly throughout is so important.

How to decide your homepage content order

In the ‘5. Order of content elements’ worksheet in the spreadsheet, you’ll find that everything from ‘4. Prioritising content elements’ has been copied over.

Move the rows around to put things into priority order.

Write a purpose statement and justification for each element, explaining why you think it should be there. Pull in evidence from the groundwork you did, like stats that show something is a key user need, or evidence that one thing is more important than the other, etc. This will help in conversations with stakeholders because you can give them rationale for your decision-making.

There are also columns to capture whether an element is going to be on the homepage permanently or temporarily, and to start fleshing out your content/design ideas. Use the latter to start gathering ideas for copy, or thoughts about how you want something to look. This will be useful when it’s time to brief your designer and writer.

Before you move on...

Complete the ‘5. Order of content elements’ worksheet in the Homepage Content Workbook spreadsheet and decide the priority order of your content.

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