It sounds so simple, and in fact, it is. Want a great website? It’s gonna need great content. It is, in the simplest view of it, the only reason anyone comes to your site, stays there, and gets value from it.
iMarc Partner Dave Tufts gently dope-slapped me on this topic many years ago, and I’ve repeated and paraphrased his comment many times since. In fact we’ve never created a great website without great content. "Well, duh!” you might say, but even so, it is sometimes overlooked in establishing budgets and work plans. I’d go as far as saying you could have a very successful website with GREAT content, even if the design and UX wasn’t top-notch (see also: Craigslist).
Content comprises many things these days, including the text on a website, but many other things fall under that heading too; including photography and illustration, infographics, motion graphics and video, documents, demos and downloads.
Here are 5 tips for making it great:
Hire professionals and plan to keep them on the team.
Professional content is developed by professionals. They do NOT need to be subject matter experts, that’s your job, but an experienced professional writer can quarterback the gathering and creation of raw content, get it all whipped into shape for consistency, voice and tone, and it will make all the difference in the quality of the site. Sure, there are some content types you may not need help with, but for the initial build this is money very well spent. Same with photography, videography and illustration. This is so important that I’m going to make this worth two on the list and go straight to number three.
Identify the key audiences and content.
Explore and prioritize the people that you most need to communicate with, and spend some time putting yourself in their shoes, thinking specifically about what they need. Sometimes it's helpful to develop different "user personas" for who might come to your site and how they could best use your site to get what they need.
- For a potential customer that might mean organizing and creating your content in a way that is most accessible to them, using language they will readily understand to communicate the value of your products and services.
- For a potential employee that might mean including information on your workplace, culture and benefits of employment.
- For existing customers and business partners that might mean maintaining content for things they frequently need, reference material, technical or other documentation, access to past orders or shipping information.
Invest in rich media, and great photography.
Content is more than text and documents, and different types of content are TONS more effective at communicating different things. Go ahead and describe a beautiful spring day like today in words while I step outside with my camera. I’ll be right back.
...
See what I mean?
Stock photography is the bane of any proud designer, and should be avoided if at all possible. Make the images you use real, personal, and authentic. Rich media also includes video, motion graphics, and infographics which are fantastic for conveying complex ideas, processes and relationships in a way that words simply can’t hope to match. (P.S. In fact I did take that photo, but I confess it was last spring during a visit to Yosemite).
Lighten up, and make it easy to digest.
Create your content, then throw half of it out, just as I did with this blog. Users don’t have time to read and digest large amounts of text, and if you care about the growing segment of your audience that is reading it on their smartphones, it had better be concise, scannable and easy to understand.
Plan to maintain it.
This is the hardest part for some but without a plan to maintain the content of the site, including a budget, schedule and resources allocated to it, it mostly won’t get done. Explore what content ought to be created, when it should be created throughout the year, and how it’s going to get created. Then make sure it happens! That will help deliver the most ROI for your site over the long haul, and give your visitors (and the all-important search engines!) a reason to return.
