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2: Your Website Content

Content is King - don't laugh! It is the whole reason for the website. Razzle dazzle has a very short shelf life.

Decide on your target audience and write for that audience. You know your audience and what they will expect of your website so give it to them. Eliminate any verbose passages, remove unnecessary adjectives. On the home page, state in clear simple English what it is you do and make sure to include plenty of keyphrases. Never talk down to your visitor. They always have their finger over the Back button.

The internal pages of your website offer more latitude but never add more text than you require to get your message across. Use Mark Twain's dictum - 'The only good word is a deleted one'.

Keep the tone informal - your website is not a insurance policy. Use 'we' and 'you' whenever possible, particularly if you are in the hospitality trade. If you are in a specialist area, think of including a glossary - don't include acronyms and jargon in the website if there is any chance that the readers will not understand it - lose them here and they will leave your website.

Remember the 'F' pattern (right). Visitors will skim read all the first paragraph, the left half of the second paragraph and the left side of the third paragraph only. If the keywords that they have in the back of their mind do not appear in these areas they will leave your website. If they do, your visitor will reread the text.

Search engines are similar and will add more weight to words at the beginning of a paragraph than at the end.

Use the inverted pyramid structure - provide a summary of the paragraph in the first sentence and expand on that in the rest of the paragraph.

The choice of headings is important, both for visitors and for search engines. Make sure that they are logical! Never ever use right-justified text - it makes it very difficult to read. Similarly, don't use all CAPITALS - THEY ARE ALSO DIFFICULT TO READ.

Provide 'pullquotes' (little boxes with extracted content - you see them in newspapers) to crystallize the essence of the adjacent passage.

A typical business website will have the following basic structure:

Other pages might be client lists, testimonials, location map, tariffs.

We will be happy to answer any queries in plain plain English!

Next, we will look at what most clients mistakenly pay most attention to - page appearance.