Emphasizing Content In Website Design
When you first start planning to build a website, your focus may get fixated on SEO issues. While these are important, website design should not be reduced to a game of attracting search engines. You want good, solid content on you site once visitors arrive at it. If they are directed to your site by deceptive or gimmicky SEO, they are likely to leave it feeling unhappy.
The quality of the writing on your site, especially a blog, is key to keeping visitors and making them want to return. The basics of writing are just as important online as in print media. Yes, there are many poorly edited websites, but you do not want to be one of them. Check your grammar, use a spellcheck feature, review sentences for clarity. Better yet, have a friend with editing skills read your content. It is hard to see the errors in what you yourself have typed.
Make sure you are not repeating, even innocently, something written by someone else. There are websites that will check this for you. Again, while there is a lot of plagiarized content on the Internet, you do not want to have it on your site.
If you are blogging, keep your opinionatedness in check. Don’t talk as if you were addressing someone sitting next to you on a bar stool. Set a civil, professional tone. Do not even come close to using offensive speech, especially racist or sexist slurs.
Professional web designers advise keeping your pages clear and simple. Do a separate page when you move to a new subject. Do a separate links page rather than sprinkling links in your text. Avoid everything that distracts from the flow of the writing.
Design is important to the effectiveness of your website. It matters which fonts, colors, images and page set ups you use. Some are more pleasing and easier on the reader than others. The standard three column format is recommended. Keep colors simple and tasteful. Especially avoid gimmicks like flashing graphics. People find them annoying. Design is important inasmuch as it makes your content more accessible to the reader. But the content is still the major thing, and you do not want to get off on a tangent by concentrating on the tools of web design.
The emphasis these days is on interaction with your readers. There are many ways you can accomplish this. You can enable comments and questions. You can offer surveys, contests and games. You can invite guest bloggers or a guest-written article. You can invite readers to share photos. It depends on what the purpose of your website is.
Studies show that many readers will not continue with an article that spills over to more than one page. So it is best to keep your postings short and limited to a single subject.
There are free automated translation services on the Web, but they generally do a choppy job. If you want to reach readers in a different language, have someone fluent in that language do the translation if you cannot do it yourself.
Your website is beginning to take shape now that you are thinking about it. Follow through with the tips given here and you will be off to a good start.
