Content Development

We partner with several marketing and communications firms to offer comprehensive content development for clients who need help articulating their message. Content development can be specific for the Web or designed for use across several media. Please contact us to learn more.

Visitors Have Problems to Solve

Content on Web sites must be tailored specifically for the medium. Web users are busy and rely on the Internet for convenient access to information. If you want to communicate effectively with this audience it's important to understand what motivates them, how they use the Web, and how to meet them on their terms.

Primarily, Web users are online to solve a problem. The sites they visit must make it instantly clear that they can solve their problem, or the visitor will move on.

Because of the volume of information available, Web users do as little reading as possible. They scan pages for relevant information, and make judgements about the usefulness of the site. Information therefore must be presented in "scannable" form. Headings, subheads, photo captions and bullet lists are all important scan-points for Web site visitors, who use these page elements to determine if there is anything worthwhile for them on the site.

If a visitor does find something of interest they will click to go deeper, and at this next level, read in more detail. But initially, visitors cannot be expected to wade through lengthy paragraphs when it's so much easier to click to something else that may be more useful.

Web site content also benefits visitors when it is heavy on information and light on "marketing-speak." Glossy, adjective-laden prose serves the company, not the visitor, and visitors have no patience for it. What visitors want is solid, factual information that helps them solve their problem. The sooner their problem is solved the sooner visitors can stop searching and become customers.

Brief Is Better

Because computer screens make reading more difficult, and because visitors are busy to begin with, Web content must be brief. Short paragraphs and sentences with plenty of white space make textual content much more inviting. Cutting the word count to the bare minimum almost always improves Web page readability.

But Web pages are not only read by people. Computers read sites, and this is especially important when sites are visited by search engine "spiders." These programs read pages and assign rankings based on the content they find. Web pages, therefore, should be written with search engines in mind. Keywords, which are embedded in META tags on Web pages, should appear frequently in the copy and fairly high up on the page. TITLE tags, META descriptions, and headings should also be "keyword rich" to improve search engine rankings.

Finally, content should cause visitors to act. "Action" should be the automatic response of visitors whose questions have been answered, and whose problem has been solved as a result of visiting the site. Content can include links and other devices to enable visitors to go to the next step and act on the information they've found. Giving users the ability to act on information is a key difference between the Web and other communications media, and should be fully utilized in Web content.