Your content is the backbone of your website. Everything starts there! If your content is useful to visitors, relevant to what they are searching for, and easy for them to read and understand, then you are far more likely to be successful at achieving the goals that you have set for your site.
In this article I’ll take you through some of the very basics of writing good content, how to apply formatting for ease of reading, and some things specific to web content that you might not have considered, even if you are an English major!
Consider your typical user
Who are they?
The first thing to do when thinking about content for your site, is to think about who your typical user is. This is going to make a lot of difference in what kind of content you should provide, and the wording of text content. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
- Who is your typical user going to be and what do you know about how they are most likely to prefer consuming content?
- Is your typical user a person who works in the same field as you and that speaks the same lingo as you do? (This will determine what terminology you should use in writing.)
- Are they an end-user or consumer of your product or service? If so, are they going to be a knowledgable customer and know exactly what they are looking for? Or do you need to create content to help guide them to what they need?
- Can you make any assumptions about how they will consume your content? Some people are very much driven by text content. For these people, the more detail in the text, the better. For other people, lots of text is overwhelming, and they would prefer to be guided down the page by illustrative graphics and photos. For many younger people or people with learning differences, video may be the best way to communicate with them. Or perhaps audio is a better format for your typical visitor.
What are they looking for?
When someone comes to your site from a search engine, they are very often looking for something pretty specific. They have a question that they would like answered, or they would like to get more information about something. If you can provide this information to your visitors, you have found relevance. From relevance, you then have an opportunity to turn that visitor into a customer. Ask yourself…
- What do you think the typical visitor is looking for when they come to your site? What questions do they have?
- What do they need to understand about you, your business, or your product or service to gain the confidence to become a customer?
Know the four main types of content
Text
Often when we think about web content, we assume that we’re talking about the written word. And the reason why is because text content is very important! It is important because it is what gets catalogued by search engines and is how people search for content. Even when you ask Siri to search for something on the web, she translates it to text first. There are some exceptions to this, but for the most part, our most common search technique is to search using text.
When to use: Everywhere, even when your content is mostly in other forms you will want to use text to round out the pages.
Images
Images are the second most common type of content on the web. Images are used to illustrate ideas more quickly and in more depth than words can explain. There is a reason why there is almost always a photographer with a reporter. There is a reason why you can browse the web and find hundreds of icon sets and graphics. Use images to help you visitors understand your content (and where they are in your content) with a single glance. Use images to help them understand your content on a deeper level or from a different perspective.
When to use: Whenever it makes sense. Use images illustratively to bring context to your text. One thing to keep in mind is the basic design principle that proximity means relationship…. so if you have a paragraph about parrots, add your photo of a parrot in close proximity to that paragraph. Another thing to keep in mind is that you should optimize your images for the web so they do not eat up your visitors’ bandwidth or negatively impact your page load speed.
Video
Video is an excellent tool to communicate with humans as another human would, and is excellent for capturing the human element. You have multiple dimensions to work with at once — visuals, audio and language. These are the three main ways to communicate that we are programmed from birth to understand.
When to use: Many people find video more useful for communicating emotions and find instructions given via video far easier to follow than written instruction. I would recommend using video any time you want to communicate emotion or create an emotional connection. A good use for video might be for testimonials, sharing of emotional stories, or telling your story, so that people can get to know who you are. I encourage you to also use video any time you have something to demonstrate, or instructions to share. You can also share the steps as text, but there is nothing like seeing things done.
Audio
Audio is an excellent way to communicate with people who want to keep their eyes and hands busy on something different as they consume your content.
When to use: This is especially useful for lengthy content, interviews or of course, music! For serial audio streams, perhaps consider a podcast!
Adopt a system for gathering and writing web content
You can (and should, if at all possible) start writing and gathering your content before you even begin to put together your website. Here is how to start:
Start with an outline
Imagine that you are creating a list of all of the pages that will be on your site. Start by listing just the titles of each of the pages. Then, organize that list into a hierarchical structure based on how those “page” topics are related. Here is an example based on some imaginary photography website:
- Home page
- About page
- Photo Galleries
- Plant Gallery
- Annuals
- Perennials
- Animal Gallery
- Mammals
- Cats
- Dogs
- Birds
- Mammals
- Plant Gallery
- Contact
Create text content for each item on your list
Once you have your base list, you can then start creating your text content. You can create this content as a Word document or as a Google document in the cloud, however you prefer to keep your word documents. It’s very handy to keep each document separately for when you do start to build these pages on your website.
Here is a guide for creating your content drafts:
Name of Page: (no more than 40 characters, preferably, and try to work in the most common or important phrase that your visitor might be looking for… attention to your visitor’s question might not be something that you are typically trained to focus on in English class, but it is very important to keep this in mind as you create your content for the web.)
Content of Page: (Don’t worry about length at this point. Mostly you are trying to just get your ideas down. Do keep in mind that there are going to be some questions that your visitors are be looking to answer. Put the question and the answer up close to the top of your content, as well as a call to action — example, “What do you do when your windshield gets a rock chip? Get it repaired right away so that it doesn’t start to crack and cause a more expensive problem down the line. We can help with that! We will come directly to your home or place of business and fix the chip while you wait. Just give us a call at (phone number here) and we’ll get you on our schedule.”
Media to find: (Make a list of photos, graphics, video and audio that you need to create or find, but don’t worry about finding/creating them at this point.)
What are people searching for? (List several things that people would likely be searching for where they would get the answer to their question if they found your page, and make sure that these phrases are somewhere in your content. Don’t add them more than once and don’t add them so that your content no longer is easy to read. After all, your human visitor is your most important visitor, not the search crawler.)
Review your content for the following things:
- Does your writing have clear sections? If so, have you used section headings? (section headings — H1 through H6 — are not intended to be used as sizing for your font. They are instead used to give importance to your headings! The name of the page should typically be an h1, and each section that comes next should be an h2. Sub sections of those h2 heading-ed sections should be h3… h4 for h3, h5 for h4, you hopefully see how that hierarchy works. Here is a page that offers a good example of how headings work at Mozilla’s site. You will find headings available for selection in a drop down menu is most modern content management systems, do don’t worry about having to hand code them. 😉
- Do you use lists where it makes sense to? (Use bulleted, unordered lists where order of items listed does not matter, and use numbered, ordered lists where the order does matter. Lists are often very useful for people to organize people’s understanding of a more complex topic or process.)
Get a second set of eyes
If you are not comfortable with your grammar and spelling, consult a friend or hire someone to be an editor. A second set of eyes on any piece of writing is always a good idea. I’ve seen plenty of typos even on 5 word sentences. 🙂
Consider your other content
Creation of graphics, photos, videos and audio are each in themselves very long and complex, winding rabbit holes, so I can’t go into those in this post. However, you may want to consider at this point, what will need to happen to create or find the non-text content that you want to display on your pages.
Collect additional thoughts and ideas
Write down any questions or ideas that you come across as you work though your content. These may be fodder for additional content or blog posts in the future.
Create and gather your non-text content
Once you have your text content together, it is time to create or locate and gather your non-text content.
If you are creating your graphics, photos, videos and audio yourself, congratulations! I am sure this is a fun process and you have more talent than I do! 🙂
If you are not up to creating these yourself, you can check for an inexpensive solution on Fiverr (remember, you get what you pay for and it can be hit and miss with freelance networking services), or you can go with a company or individual who specializes in this kind of content. If you are not sure where to go, you can reach out to us and we can connect you with someone who specializes in these kind of content creation services.
A note specifically for photos and graphics: IF YOU OPT TO FIND FREE GRAPHICS AND PHOTOS ONLINE, BE EXTREMELY CAREFUL! I would not recommend re-posting photos or graphics that you find online unless you know for absolutely certain that you can use these freely. In our current climate, there is no such thing as a “cease and desist” notice — you will simply receive a bill in the mail for unlicensed use of an image or a notice of lawsuit against you. Please, please, please, be extremely careful where you source your images from.
Summing it up…
Content is the most important part of your site! It takes a long time, your expert knowledge, a thoughtful understanding of your visitors and customers, and some writing skills. Be patient with yourself and take your time to put in the work. In the end, well thought-out site content is far more valuable to you and your visitors than something that you simply throw together.
