Content

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…Be clear and concise and vigorous.

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

Use correct grammar and spelling. Avoid acronyms and jargon.

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Content Tips

A page must be scannable.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

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

Be interesting.Use strong, colorful, active wording.Mind your tone/”voice”: formal, hip,

humorous, etc. Write the way you talk?

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

Don’t feature a prominent visitor counter unless you are sure the numbers will be impressive (maybe not even then).

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

Research has shown that few people are willing to read online – instead, they scan. If they want to read in depth, they 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 table cell in the middle – the visitor can select just the center column to print.

• But most visitors don’t know how to do this.

Or, CSS with “media: print” (more later)

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Content Tips

Consider adding a search option for larger sites.

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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Value-added Content

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

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.

NIU offers an online phone book, grade reports, schedule of courses, etc.

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

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Value-added Content

Run a special promotion on a regular schedule.Dell Computer has specials on refurbished

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

Colonial Rose Inn, a restaurant, offers discount coupons that change every week.

Amazon.com occasionally offers coupons or free shipping.

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Value-added Content

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

www.arentfox.com/features/sweepstakes/faq/faq.html for details.

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 or learn to ski.

Offer recipes. A specialty food company might offer recipes

using their packaged foods.

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Value-added Content

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

recipes online, at their site.The Jelly Belly site offers a free packet of

Jelly Bellies to people who fill out their survey page.

Trekk, a web consulting company, offered a tutorial on techie topics that a savvy client needs to understand before hiring a consultant.

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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.” Hence a legal battle.

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Value-added Content

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

Call National Discount Brokers at 800-888-3999, listen to the options, choose #7.

• Not web marketing, but an interesting concept nonetheless.

• Millions of emails are now circulating this number.

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Content Management

Programs (like Macromedia’s Contribute) that allow clients to manage their own content while web designers manage the code that surrounds the content.

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Content Management

Two ways:Both programmers and clients work on

the HTML page, but the code areas are “frozen” to clients.• Contribute, small $

The content is in separate files on the server, imported to the page by the browser, clients are allowed access only to content files. Large $$$

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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.

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