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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.
April 15th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Great information in this article. Some of the things like writing in capital letters and using crazy colors seem obvious…however, you see people doing it frequently.
I see spelling mistakes too. It really detracts from the “trust level”.
May 21st, 2008 at 9:23 am
I do agree with you. The initial thing that really needs to be good is the design though. Even if the design quality lacks you are sure of loosing visitors even with a quality content.Both works together just making a site work and also the visitor happy.
Thanks for the links on further reading.