Marie Kondo’s mission is to bring joy through the art of organization- specifically by discarding unnecessary household belongings and creating a tidy system for what remains. The end result is an easy to navigate home that provides a joyful living environment.
Your website also acts as a home base for your marketing efforts, whether you’re utilizing a landing page for pay-per-click campaigns, sharing blog posts on social, or organically being found for relevant keywords.
Tidy Up Your Website By Category
Marie Kondo is all about tidying up by category, so we will focus on the following 5 website categories:
1. Brand Standards to express your identity consistently
2. Content for sharing resourceful information
3. Call-To-Actions to guide your users during their journey
4. Navigation to sort the various areas of your website
5. Design to add value and joy to your users’ experience
Brand Standards
Even if you’re the sole manager of website content, it is still easy to be inconsistent with your voice, messaging, and goals. Add in a few other team members and the issue multiples! Outlining brand standards or tidying up existing standards is a great first step to tidying up your website.
Ideas on how to do this?
- Determine your controlling idea- why is it that you do what you do?
- Outline your audience’s needs/wants/goals and how you help them.
- Create your brand personality (tone of voice, visual tone, values, “dos” and “don’ts”)
Content
Your website content should not overwhelm your audience or bombard them with unwanted information. Break your content down in to the most essential and compelling components which will be more digestible and present users with what they need before they take their next steps.
Ideas for how to do this?
- What are the common questions your clients and prospects have? Use that as inspiration for the foundation of your content.
- Within your pages, make sure you are using proper formatting like headers to break content into easily digestible and skimmable sections.
Call-To-Actions
Determine the one or two key actions users should be taking when visiting the website. These next steps should be easily accessible and clear to your visitors.
Ideas for how to do this?
- Have one primary CTA per page
- Use action-oriented text
- Limit CTA text to 2-4 words
Navigation
Having clean content will be a great starting point in terms of making your content easier to navigate. However, when it comes to your website, intuitive and simplified navigation is key.
Ideas for how to do this?
- As you probably already know, a website that isn’t mobile friendly is going to be very difficult to navigate. So that is a must.
- Tell your users where to go by limiting their options. This will prevent decision fatigue rather than forcing the users to hunt for information.
- Label navigation items in your audience’s words, not your internal jargon.
- If you have a large amount of site content, make sure you have a search feature.
Design
Good website design will not only be attractive and easy to use, but also allow you to tell a story through your website content. This approach will help you connect with your target audience on a deeper level with the intention of truly providing them with a valuable experience. Say yes to SPARKING JOY!
Ideas for how to do this:
- Remove “hidden” content when possible and incorporate it elsewhere as needed. For example, sliders that may be hiding equally important content OR pages with little to no views.
- Incorporate white space. This will allow each content section to have its time to shine without overwhelming your visitors’ eyes.
- Include subtle animations to spark joy.
A Tidy “Home”
Just as Marie Kondo aims to do with tidying up a home, your efforts should result in an easy to navigate website that provides a joyful user experience. As an organization, you can do this by being consistent, understanding your customer’s needs, making the path to your solution simple, and finding ways to spark joy along the way!
