Knowing what content to include on your website can be just as important as how the site looks during the website building process. Many website design companies offer to develop and organize the content for your site as an additional service, but this can come at a large price.

Doing your website's content yourself can save you a lot of money, but it’s not as simple as throwing a few words on the page and leaving it up to the customer to figure out how to navigate your website. You want to carefully structure your website’s content so that it is intuitive, easy to quickly understand, and acts as a spokesperson for your economic development organization and region.

It’s time to create a new website for your economic development organization, and making a sitemap of how a user will navigate your website is the first step. It seems easy, but like visiting an unorganized and congested website, you don’t know where to start.

In this post, we will outline simple steps for building a sitemap for your EDO’s website. While the focus is on economic development content, many of the principles throughout this post can be used for associations, real estate, non-profits, jewish community centers, or anyone else who is starting to build their website.

A website with intuitive navigation will help build a better user experience for your customers -- leading to more conversions, stronger leads, and better overall customer satisfaction.

A website with poor navigation, however, will leave customers frustrated, confused, and disoriented -- all symptoms of high bounce rates for your site. An unorganized menu can also cause visitors to miss important information or direct high traffic to your least important pages.

You can avoid all of this with some simple planning on how users will navigate your website. By using a sitemap, you can build a website that works FOR your customers, and not against them.

What a year it’s been already! The bar for what makes a website stunning has officially been raised. As we poke our heads out for Spring, we can take a look at what new website design trends are emerging and identify some of the best association websites of 2017 so far.