We spend a lot of time carefully crafting the visual aspects of websites. This important aesthetic quality helps to shape someone’s first impression when they visit your website. However, as a greater length of time is spent on the site there becomes a blindness to this outer shell, and the content that you have within it is what should shine.
This is often a forgotten or neglected aspect of website creation. In her article “Starting Out Organized” posted on Smashing Magazine, Kirstin Wemmer explains different methods of content planning and organization. These are all important tools to be used (when needed) at particular stages in the website creation process.
In my experience if you’re redesigning any content driven website (particularly larger scale ones), there is always the need to go through the rather painful content audit process. This tedious, but extremely necessary part of the process can save you a lot of headache in later stages. Without thorough analysis and a lot of harsh editing, rewriting, re-grouping, you’ll end up trying to re-purpose what is already in there and hit roadblocks later on. It’s the same old adage – if you put garbage in you get garbage out.
Whatever content units you decide to keep, edit, delete or create should start from an understanding your users. Who are they? What are they there to learn? What are their patterns of content consumption? What information do they want to receive and in what form do they want to receive it? Think about ways that you can add value your website content to captivate your audience and bring them back.
If your website can become a valuable source of content on a particular topic (or even fun/ quirky/ interesting) this will encourage repeat visitation. Here are some ideas out there in the wild:
- Three Wise Men – a business shirt company have an area called the boredroom. This works with their brand, and provides businessmen with a reason to come back to see a tit bit of comical content if they’re bored at work.
- NZ Ski – have a webcam so potential visitors can see what it’s like on the mountain, and snow bunnies can check out what the conditions are like for the day.
- The Rock – have a funny s**t area which uses video to extend their brand online
However, this all said and done, your audience won’t find you just because you create a website with all of this great content. As Lisa Barone of Outspoken Media put it in her post “Content is not King. Your ability to promote that content is.” You need to employ methods to get your site promoted at least initially, but once you have a following your audience will promote content for you.
To find out more about how you can promote your site effectively in search engines such as Google contact our Search Engine Optimisation Team or find out more about this on our website http://www.kelpdesign.com/search-engine-optimisation/