Content is King

There’s a saying in web design: “content is king”, meaning that it doesn’t matter how good a site is, without quality and frequently updated content the site will most likely not receive repeat visits. Therefore the easier it is for you and others to create and maintain the content on your site the more likely it is that fresh content will be published and therefore (hopefully) produce more hits on your site.

Good interactive and visual design will greatly enhance the effectiveness of your content. But, without good content your site will never be an effective business instrument. The most successful sites are the ones that have lots of well written, accurate, up to date and regularly changing content related to their particular field. They perform well in search engines because of the amount of content and keywords contained in the articles. Also, these sites will generally get linked to by other relevant sites and this boosts rankings greatly because it helps search engines judge your site as a relevant site.

So, if you are about to contact a designer to construct a new website, do you have a good idea of what you want your site to say?

The best content you can provide to your customers is the content they are looking for. Yes, that sounds tremendously obvious. But, most sites simply don't provide it. As an example, the FLashburn Portfolio gets far more page views than any other page on this site. Being a web designer, people want to see what we can do for them.

Do you have customers email you, call you or come into your place of business? Do you sell products face to face with people? If so, what questions are most commonly asked by your customers? These are the questions in peoples minds when they are browsing your website. If you can give people this information as soon as they hit your site, you will have a successful website.

Once you've identified the key information you need to provide, don't stop. You can't have too much content as long as it is structured and well organised. What makes you unique? Why are your staff so good? What makes you competitive? What makes customers loyal to you? What will sustain you into the future? What can your customer expect?  See if your suppliers can provide you with brochures, information, downloads, articles, etc?

So before going too deep into the visuals, nail the content first. If you need further proof of the relevance of content, look at two of the most successful sites on the web at the moment. www.google.com and www.youtube.com . Nothing fancy in the design of either site, just massive amounts of instantly accessible, relevant content.

Andrew Jackman is the Managing Director of Flashburn Design, a web development, marketing and web hosting company based in Melbourne, Australia, specialising n Content Management Systems and e-commerce websites.