Your Website Content – An Introduction

So… What is Website Content?

Website Content is the textual and visual content a visitor experiences on a website. Your content includes text, images, sounds, videos, and the presentation of these elements. The content on your website is how you tell your story, present your brand and engage your audience. A good website developer will use client-supplied content to help guide the design of the website.

Of all the elements in your website content, the text is most important. A good web developer will tweak your text for SEO (search engine optimization) and presentation purposes, but the over all message must come from you. The textual content should answer a website developer’s and, by extension, your visitor’s basic questions.

1. WHO? – Information about yourself, your company or organization. Branding.
   • History or interesting narrative
   • Mission statements
   • Business Philosophies
   • Explanation of company culture
   • Operating principles
   • Officers, staff and /or members
2. WHAT? – Detailed information about what you, your company or organization does.
   • Details about services, products or information offered through the website
   • Highlight key processes or procedures implemented
   • Highlight unique aspects of your product, services and/or information
   • Distinctions between you, your company or organization and competitors
3. HOW? – How can I obtain the products, services or information that I’m seeking? How can you, your company or organization be contacted?
   • Contact information
   • Web forms: what information needs to be captured by the form
   • Social media information

Website developers can make your website look good and function well, but they can’t explain what your company /organization does or how your company /organization does what it does.

Textual website content is most important because it can guide your website design,  it conveys the message of your website, and search engine optimization is based on your text. Stock images, sounds and video can be implemented if the textual information is detailed and comprehensive. This does not mean that you shouldn’t supply images, sounds or videos related to your business or organization. Images, sounds and videos add life to your textual information. Any website designer would rather have more material than needed, instead of not having enough. Images, sounds and videos help convey your branding, can show your services or products ‘in action’ and hold the attention of your visitors.

1. Images
   • Product images
   • Images that convey a key process, procedure or concept
   • Staff/ Members /Officers images
   • Event images
   • Icons and logos
2. Sounds
   • Music
   • Spoken instructions
   • Sound that convey your brand or are related to you, or business or organization
   • Interviews, lectures, sermons etc.
   • Podcasts
3. Videos
   • Commercials
   • Marketing videos
   • Event videos
   • Instructional videos

Any relevant content that you can supply to your website developer / designer is good. Well crafted text, quality images, sounds and video can insure that your message is conveyed properly. With good content, a website developer can experiment with different presentation methods and have information to fill out the design.

When embarking on developing your website, focus on your content! Many people focus on the look of their website, to the neglect of what really matters… the website content. A website can have the best design and incorporate all the ‘bells and whistles’ but if the content is not substantive, engaging, informing and well thought-out it will not perform well.