Most website owners recognise the value of good website content yet this appreciation can often occur when they are visiting websites other than their own.
So how does your website compare? Do you think you’ve got good website content?
To find out, ask yourself the following 5 questions:
Is your website content relevant and meaningful to your target audience or is it mainly spin and waffle?
Is your website content clear and digestible to your target audience or do they just switch off and go away?
Is your website content engaging and informative to your target audience or does it offer little emotional or educational value?
Is your website content too technical or complex for your target audience resulting in uncertainty or confusion?
Is your website content wedged between blocks of irrelevant or unrelated information making it difficult to find or understand?
If any of these questions describe the written content on your website, then perhaps you need to look at ways to make your information more accessible and more valuable to your audience.
Bear in mind that for your website content to carry greater weight for both site visitors and Web ‘bots, it’s all down to its MERIT.
In other words, make your website content Memorable, Engaging, Relevant, Informative and Targeted.
I loaded Google custom search engine on The Escape website in March - why not use the best in the business? Business edition starts at $100 per year, so for just £50 per year you can include a killer search facility on your own website.
Not only does custom search improve the user experience but if you integrate it with your analytics account, you can analyse what people have been searching for to further improve your site…
This video explains something that I find myself trying to explain to customers with websites, their hosting and their country audience… Over to Susan Moskwa of Google.
When I am creating meta descriptions and meta titles for new web pages, I often wonder what they will look like in a search engine result page.
I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago to our web team and they built me this neat little tool for checking your meta tags for search engines. So, I thought we’d share it with you too… The Better Meta Checker!
Design of a website is user interface design rather than creative pretty-ness and this has recently been highlighted to me (again).
Firstly, in a usability session with a client and a stranger, which allowed the client to subjectively see how someone used their website and also confirmed again today by Jakob Neilsen with his Top 10 Application Design Mistakes article.
The key thing is with people is that they are, if nothing else, creatures of habit and when it comes to displaying ‘rules’ we need constancy. That’s why we can all understand road signs when we go on our summer hols - because they are so similar to the ones in the UK.
It’s the same with a website. People will ‘expect’ navigation to be in a certain place - either across the top or down the left-side. If they see a search button, you can assume they probably know how it works.
There is though still a tendency to apply print design rules onto new media. The problem is, if you don’t stick with the very basic premise that at the end of the computer is a person, you may leave them staring at your site wondering…
