Content

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Content

• Content is king. If you don’t have good content, you don’t have visitors.

• “It doesn’t matter how you present the content of a page if the content isn’t worth presenting.” Dave DeAngelo

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Content

• Purpose and audience drives content; every bit of content on the site should support the site purpose and be geared toward its audience.

• Sticky sites: Sites that keep visitors browsing for a long period of time, and that visitors return to again and again.

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Content

• Ask why anyone would want to return to the site a second time, or even better, a 97th time. – If you can’t give a good answer to

that, you need to come up with a way to get visitors to return to you site.

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Content• Two major ways to do this:

– Update the content constantly, and make sure visitors know that it will be updated constantly.

– Don’t just talk about how cool the company is – give the visitors something of value to them right now.

• Show the value (most important information) of the site immediately.– Slant your site to the value given to

your customer, not what the company values.

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Content Tips

• Answer who, what, when, where, why, as appropriate.

• Use correct grammar and spelling.– Read the content aloud – you ear will

catch errors that your eyes will not.– Read the content backwards – more

likely to notice when words are misspelled.

• Avoid acronyms and jargon.

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Content Tips

• Be clear and concise and vigorous.– Use strong, colorful, active wording:

• “She walked down the street,” versus• “The young lass trudged through the

dingy alley.”– Mind your tone/”voice”: formal, hip,

humorous, etc. Write the way you talk?

– “If average citizens are bad writers, clients are bad writers with egos.” Jeffrey Zeldman, Taking Your Talent to the Web

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Content Tips• A page must be scannable;

research has shown that few people are willing to read online – instead, they scan.– Bullet when possible.– Chunk (cluster) information with

headings and subheads.– Use short paragraphs.– Put most important points of each

paragraph first, in a topic sentence, rather than using less-important points to build to a concluding sentence.

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Content Tips

• If the page is something visitors what to read in depth, the will most likely print it out first. – You may want to provide two pages,

one optimized for printing.

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Content Tips– Alternately, optimize the page so that

a selection can be easily printed, such as menus on left, sidebars on right, and all content in a long and narrow content area in the middle – the visitor can select just the center column to print.• But many visitors don’t know how to do

this?– Or, CSS with media: print (more later)

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Content Tips

• Be careful with humor; extreme cleverness can be extremely irritating on subsequent iterations of the joke.– Like radio ads that are amusing only

the first time, then you change the channel every time after that.

• Be very careful with religious or culturally sensitive content.

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Content Tips

• Use “hooks” favored by journalists:– Ask the reader a question.– Quote someone else.– Provide a thought-provoking

sentence.– Promise conflict.

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Content Tips

• Avoid visitor counters – they are out of style and no one trusts them anyway.

• Give visitors an easy way to contact you if they have questions.– Provide an email address and a phone

number; most of us have come to the conclusion that email responses are usually slow, at best, from web sites.

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Content Tips

• If using a metaphor through the site, make it appropriate.– Kenwood Audio used a hotel

metaphor – a lobby, a laundry room, etc. – which was not appropriate for a stereo system retailer.

– The New York Times has a home page that looks just like a newspaper – an appropriate metaphor.

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Content Tips

• Display important information prominently.– On any page, the most important

information should go “above the fold” (from the newspaper business).• For web sites, that means on the first

screen of information, not down into scrollable areas.

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Content Tips

• Consider using a one-sentence-or-less tag line that succinctly summarizes what your site is all about:– Dive into Accessibility: 30 Days to a

More Accessible Web Site.– IMDb: Earth’s Biggest Movie

Database™– Dr. Dobbs: Software Tools for the

Professional Programmer

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Content Tips

• If you are quoting someone else, whether from a printed or electronic source (including other web sites), you must attribute it, and if more than just a sentence or two, you must get their permission in writing.

• Images cannot be used at all without permission, even if attributed.

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Content Tips

• Don’t explicitly welcome people to your site, as in “Welcome to Penny’s Page.” It’s amateurish and a waste of browser real estate. – Exception: sites geared to an Oriental

audience, which may expect such good manners.

• Consider formatting longer content as downloadable Adobe pdf files.

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Content Tips

• Display the date the content was created, if relevant.– The date of a news story is relevant.– The date when the solution to a

complex mathematical solution was posted may not be.

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Value-added Content

• Value-added content: giving content above and beyond the obvious purpose of the site.

• Not the standard stuff you would expect on the site, like showing the books you can buy from Amazon.

• Examples of value-added content…

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Value-added Content

• Providing unique information.– Amazon.com’s book reviews. – A company marketing car wash

franchises might discuss the differences between brush-based and brushless systems.

– White Flower Farm, a plant retailer, offered humorous commentary on gardening issues.

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Value-added Content– William-Sonoma offers recipes that

use their packaged foods and cooking equipment.

– Trekk, a web consulting company, offered a tutorial on techie topics that a savvy client needed to understand before hiring a consultant (now removed from their site).

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Value-added Content

• Run a special promotion on a regular schedule.– Dell Computer used to have specials

on refurbished computers every Saturday morning, and the other specials change almost daily.

– Offering discount coupons that change on a predictable schedule.

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Value-added Content

• Run a contest.– Be careful here – legal ramifications.

Consult an attorney.• Offer online tours.

– A visual “tour” of Italy works well for a company marketing tours of Italy.

– A visual “tour” of a meat-packing plant would probably be less successful.

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Value-added Content• Offer demonstrations of how to do

something, like carve a turkey (Butterball Turkeys) or learn to ski (a ski equipment site).

• Provide free products or services.– Several cookware sites offer to store

your recipes online, at their site.– The Jelly Belly site offered a free

packet of Jelly Bellies to people who fill out their survey page.

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Value-added Content

• Let visitors contribute to the site and get their five minutes of fame; encourage them to add pictures or reviews or tips or whatever.– The term is building community.– A photography equipment site has an

online gallery of photos that customers can contribute to, then other visitors are invited to critique those photos.

– Amazon’s reviews.

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Value-added Content

• Provide links (no money exchanged) or tie-ins (your site is paid by the linked-to site) to related sites.– The web site for this course might

offer links to Amazon.com to show books from the recommended bibliography, or a link to WebPagesThatSuck.com.

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Value-added Content– Careful with unpaid links, however – it

may not be legal to post a link to a site without that site’s permission.• Example: MSN linked to TicketMaster

without permission. TicketMaster wasn’t content to have people funneled into its site for free – they wanted payment from Microsoft and didn’t want MSN to do “deep linking” because it bypassed the ads on their home page. Hence a legal battle.

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Value-added Content

• Answer FAQs about the product. • Anything else you can come up

with, particularly if it is so cool that people pass it on for you – viral marketing.– A few years back, an email was

circulated with instructions to call National Discount Brokers at 800-888-3999, listen to the options, choose #7

– A duck quacking. Silly, but effective.

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Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Programs that allow content providers to manage their own content while web designers and programmers manage the code that surrounds the content.

• Three general techniques…

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Content Management Systems (CMS)

1. Content providers work on the HTML page but can change only the content areas. Examples:• WordPress is a free template

system for blogs http://wordpress.com/

• Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications https://drupal.org/

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Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Joomla http://www.joomla.org/ • Dreamweaver plus either

Contribute or Dreamweaver templates.– Relatively cheap, since only the cost

of the editing software for each workstation.

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Content Management Systems (CMS)

2. Using a full-featured, ready-made content management system, in which the content is in separate files on the server that are joined with the HTML page when the webserver ships the page off to the browser. • Content providers create the

content in familiar software, such as Word.

• Expensive – a system-wide license.

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Content Management Systems (CMS)

3. Custom programming solutions/applications to manage the entire system, including standard databases on the server-side.• Example: Amazon.• Custom programming can range

from expensive to exorbitantly expensive, depending upon the size and complexity of the system.

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Content Summary

• If you can’t come up with any valuable content that entices visitors to return time after time, you shouldn’t be building a site.

• The old marketing adage is that it costs five times as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell to a returning customer.