Ever telephone an office, and find yourself lost in an endless loop of voice mail? Have you ever hung up, wondering why someone would make it so hard to reach a real live human being, and to get the information you need? That’s the kind of frustration experienced by visitors who visit a badly designed website.
So if you want your site to be popular – and who doesn’t? – you need to take a long, hard look at how you present your content. Correctly following a few principles of “content design” can mean the difference between a site that is visited only once and forgotten, and a site visitors come back to again and again, and refer to their friends.
Content Basics
Writing for the web isn’t like writing a book report. Rather than creating a single document that describes your business, you need to think “modular.” Break up your story into individual pages, each one devoted to a specific topic. Choose unique keywords for each page so you’ll have a greater chance of showing up in the search engines.
When creating links to your website pages, use the shortest possible phrasing. A single word – like “About” – is preferable to “Click Here to Meet Your New Best Friends in the Food Service Industry.”
Keep your text short and easy to scan with the help of bold headings and bullet lists. Prioritize your content so that your most important marketing message is visible without scrolling down or clicking through to another page.
Before you write, do thorough market research. Make sure you have a profile of your “ideal” site visitor, and understand his or her needs. Then, use headlines, testimonials and graphic elements to let them know – instantly – that they’ve come to the right place.
Navigation
Like a voice mail nightmare, too many clicks on a website is a no-no. Your visitors want to-the-point information that they can access quickly, with a minimum chance of getting sidetracked or lost. Limit choices, and make sure it’s always clear how to get back to the home page. On particularly content-rich sites, a site map can help visitors see how you’ve organized your information.
If you provide links to other sites, make sure they open in a separate window – otherwise, you may be ushering your hard-earned visitors away from your site, for good!
Conduit Toolbars – Content Made Accessible
Conduit community toolbars display your site’s most important marketing content to your target audience, whenever they’re online. Offered as a free download, the toolbar sits in the browser window, displaying dynamic alerts about the goings-on at your site, encouraging click-throughs. Just like a well-designed home page, this leads to greater awareness of your site and its offerings, easier navigation, a higher level of satisfaction, and increased traffic.
Conduit toolbar subscribers are drawn in by the fun that can be engineered into the platform – including newsfeeds and media stations, gadgets and games. Once downloaded, however, the toolbar serves as an advance sales agent, reminding subscribers about your unique focus and selling points. The toolbar serves as a one-click portal to your site, resulting in more site visits. And that’s content engineering at its best.
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