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Following on from my Content is King post, this piece will talk about the importance of getting some good quality content onto your site.
Good design will hook a visitors short term attention, but you have to back it up with some decent quality, highly visible text that will help let visitors know what you are about and what your site has to offer them.
If it takes a visitor more than 20 seconds to work out exactly what they can get out of your site the chances are that they will navigate away. As such, your text must be concise and to the point but still have enough detail to give your product/service an enticing feel.
The benefits of good copy are not restricted to your visitors, well laid out copy that is rich in keywords will help towards your S.E. rankings but again, getting the balance is important, if you just cram as much keyword repetition into your text it won’t read properly and the benefit from additional rankings will be wasted when visitors leave your site because they cant understand the text. Read more about content v SEO here.
Make sure that all your text is written in prose and that your font style, size and colour is legible. The last thing you want is for your page to look like it was written by a 6-year-old and if you write in capitals, use crazy colours and text, thats exactly what it will look like, even if the content itself is quite good. Have a look here to see what I mean.
Some schoolboy errors for poor web text would be not putting enough description in your product blurbs, not explaining your services well enough or, conversely, using way too much detail and losing the interest of your visitors, spelling mistakes are basic and grammar should usually be proper, though sometimes this depends on your target audience. Stay away from some of these and you are looking at a fairly decent piece of web copy.
I recently found the blog of Joshua Clanton. You might want to check it out, like me he likes to sing the praises of content over design.
Thats not to say that we don’t appreciate good design when we see it, but more that we can understand that the majority of sites have a role to play and that it is all too easy for a site’s designer to get caught up in good aesthetics rather than making sure that the design optimises the sites’ performance.
Anyway, its a great blog with some great pieces, take a look.