The Design of Sites: Pattern Group D — Writing and Managing Content
Pattern Group D of The Design of Sites — eleven patterns (D1-D11) covering how to manage large volumes of Web content and present it consistently to a wide range of visitors.
License: © 2006 Pearson Education / New Riders — all rights reserved, no open license; one of the book’s co-authors is a FuguUX founder, which is the basis for citing it here.
Key points
- Page Template (D1) — the global-vs-individual template distinction, using a grid as a template’s backbone, and designing related templates as small variations on a shared base rather than as independent designs.
- Content Modules (D2) — the reusable, database- or file-backed content areas that a page template’s publishing system fills in, and the administration tooling that lets non-developers publish into them.
- Headlines and Blurbs (D3) — writing a short, hook-driven headline and blurb for each piece of content, and storing both alongside the full article so they can be reused anywhere the content is promoted.
- Personalized Content (D4) — intentional (edit, interview) vs. automatic (deduce, filter) personalization, why forcing personalization on new visitors backfires, and the account/cookie/privacy obligations personalization brings with it.
- Message Boards (D5) — anonymity and moderation as independent design decisions, findability, threaded vs. unthreaded views, and administrative tooling for community boards.
- Writing for search engines (D6) and distinctive HTML titles (D9) — see Search Engine Optimization: D6 covers the keywords meta tag’s legacy role, crawler/accessibility overlap, and black-hat/self-inflicted-penalty patterns; D9 covers using a page’s title as more than a ranking signal (bookmarks, desktop shortcuts, breadcrumb-based titling).
- Inverted-pyramid writing style (D7) — see Plain Language and Headlines and Blurbs: headline-writing craft, avoiding promotional hype, and list-length guidance.
- Printable Pages (D8) — building a dedicated printer-friendly page template rather than styling the on-screen page for print, and labeling the output with title/author/date/URL.
- Internationalized and localized content (D10) — see Internationalization: translator and localization-management practices, cultural adaptation beyond translation (terminology, color meaning, holidays, tailored services), and cross-border legal considerations.
- Style sheets (D11) — separating content markup from print/screen presentation rules via CSS.