Content is everything

As the new year (2010) aproaches and during the break many people are taking time to reflect, and plan.

2009 was a great year on the internet. The global economy had a direct effect on business and saw many start-up e-businesses.

As a result of the “great global economy crash” many people found their way to the internet and decided to use it as a way to communicate their business not only using the social network sites – Facebook and Twitter et al. but with their own dedicated web site.

This is good news but has problems. The more web sites out there the more competition every web site faces.  Therefore it is becoming more important to have a web site that people not only visit but is friendly.

Sounds obvious, but it is very easy to design a web site that annoys the people who visit it and much harder to create a site the same people like, love and will keep coming back to.

Fortunately, the most common website mistakes are very easy to prevent or fix.

The first and most important aspect of any web site design is to make sure it has something to offer visitors.

Too many people start with the design rather than with the content - remember this, a web page exists to provide something that’s useful or interesting to visitors. If your site doesn’t do/have that, then it has a big problem from the outset and you should rethink the project until you can offer something useful or of interest.

Having got over that hurdle you now have a site/site concept that is of interest to people – you are now in with a chance – so try not to annoy those valuable people further.

The next big thing - and I mean a really big thing - is one of understanding differences.  The web is a great leveler.  In theory a small company can compete with a big multi-national one but ………..can they really?

Most people have heard of the BBC, Shell, New York Times, Amazon, Exxon etc. they are familiar brand names, your business may be familiar in your locality but probably not on the web and with over 20 million websites, like me you are a small fish in a very big pond.

This means there are different design rules for us as small businesses.  We really need to be more content not design focused.  What a big business can get away with – and be expected to have in their design – is totally different to us small businesses.

The golden rule is content, content, content.

Which would you prefer:

• To pay $1000 (or more - we heard of a small (emphasis small) business that paid $9000 for a site) for a great looking website that only gets a few visitors a day - or
• Pay $500-$1000 for a good looking but functional website that attracts 100 plus visitors a day.

I won’t answer for you but I suspect that most people would go for option no.2

Virtually everybody who designs websites (and those who run them) forget one thing.

The internet is the only media in the world where what is actually designed may not be what someone sees.

For varying reasons people change settings in their browsers – e.g. someone with poor eyesight that doesn’t use a screen reader may set their browser to show large text by default.  People can also set a default font, choose not to display images or multi-media etc.

We designed a site for one client, the client was really happy with it, it looked good (and incidentally performed really well increasing on-line sales by over 300% in 3 months).

The site was designed setting Arial as the default font in the CSS and a normal font size i.e. 100% which depending on the browser equates to either font size 14 or 16.

During the design stage the client’s wife was always on the phone complaining that we were not using the font Arial and that the text size was too big, she sent us screen dumps from here PC which clearly showed the font of Comic Sans and about font size 20.  What she forgot to say was that she had set these aspects as the defaults in her browser.

So a cautionary tale about being over fussy with design people change setting in their browsers.

I will say this now, and no doubt will repeat it again but design your web site for the people who will actually use it – not you and most certainly not your designer/programmer.  Just because you or your designer/programmer likes something doesn’t mean the people you are trying to attract will.

As a visitor too many web sites there are many frustrating things about the way people design their sites, many mean that I just “switch off” and look elsewhere for alternative content.

I am not alone, people go to a website for its’ content not to admire “add ons” like animation (graphics & text) and sounds that load automatically. These few items make it harder to concentrate on reading the site content.  Which would you rather have? someone who is focused on your content or a person who is being distracted and leaves?

Some addons may seem cool to have – but why? The big question is do they add value to the content - or are they just your designers’ way of showing off telling the world that they can add these aspects.  Don’t forget most designers include a link back to their site and quite possibly will show your site off in their portfolio.  Why do you think designers include so much that isn’t actually needed?

Consider your user.  I tell clients everyday and I will repeat it again here – make it easy for visitors to find the content (there’s that word again) on your site..

Having got them to your site what do you do?

• Minimize clicking, remember people prefer 3 or less clicks to get to the information.
• Make sure there is a menu on each page, if not, at least a way to navigate to the home page, back a page and forward to the next page.
• Now we come to the content.  A sensible page will not be less than about 400 words, if it is (less) then why does it exist? You should either be adding more content to it or combining it with another page.
• In addition to minimal clicks, minimize scrolling.  Along with many others I find long pages frustrating and often difficult to find the information I am looking for. Try to keep a page length - that is totally different to content length) to 2 screens.  In other words people only have to scroll once to get to the bottom of the page and very importantly make sure that the ”meat” of the content is “above the fold” – that means within the first screen before people have to start scrolling.
• Long content should be split - page 1, page 2 etc.  If you are using WordPress or simlar blog software then this facility should be automatically built into your blog theme (if it’s not then ask why not)
• Think about the use of columns in the presentation.  Wide ones make it harder to read the content and narrower ones make a page longer.  Look at the way magazines and newspapers are laid out, they use columns to keep a reader focused on particular sections.

Russell Parrott owns ezeewp designers and devlopers of WordPress themes and plugins

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