Website Content Research and Development

Some of our clients already have the content of their website — the text, the data, and the images — just about ready to go when they first contact us. That’s fine, of course, and we can take it from there.

But more often, clients want quite a bit of assistance from the experienced writers and editors at Allied Internet with development of the content for their websites.

• Sometimes this involves rewriting the content on an existing website to make it more precise, concise, and targeted to our client's audiences.
• Sometimes our clients ask us to research and write new content for their websites.
• Sometimes we take a client's brochures, interview the owner, manager, and/or sales staff, and use the materials and interviews to develop new content for the website.

The Importance of Website Content

Because your content is much more important than your site’s graphic design, we help many of our clients develop concise and precise content for their websites. It's all about the words that tell who you are and what you're offering.

If your site is easy to navigate and visually clean, you’ve taken care of the most important design issues. But if your content is deficient, a great design won’t help you.

Your design is not a factor in the placement of your site on search engine results pages. Few visitors to your site will make a decision to stay-and-buy — or hit the “Back” button — based on your graphic design, unless it’s distracting or confusing. Most of them just want to see who you are and find out if you offer what they are looking for.

Communicate with Your Target Audiences

Keep focused on the fact that you target an audience by speaking precisely and concisely to the people in that audience in ways they will understand. The text on your website should sound like something you would actually say in ordinary conversation. Communicating with some unspecified, generic audience won’t position you for success.

Communication with your target audiences will be your fundamental task when you develop or evaluate the content of your business website. Assume that it’s just you and the individual person who visits your website, and speak to her as if she were right there in your office or store.

Think about the specific products and services each of these audiences could buy from you, and take some notes. Then think about what will make them want to buy from you rather than from your competitors.

Consider using the second person (“you”) when you’re explaining the benefits people will get from your products, from your services, and from doing business with you instead of with your competitors. If you’re selling skateboards to teenagers, speak to them. Communicating with some unspecified, generic audience won’t position you for success.

Finally, be sure to distinguish between your own personal preferences and what it will take to persuade your target audiences.

When you collaborate with others on this project, make sure that no one gets the impression that you are the target audience — sometimes a danger for those who work within a command-and-control culture.

Our Approach to Website Content Development

Allied Internet's approach to website content development and text design includes the following considerations:

1. Too little information is frustrating.
2. Too much information can be overwhelming.
3. Successful communication means that website content must be organized to inform and persuade potential customers very quickly.
4. The tone of your content should be consistent with your brand and branding strategy, but informal is ordinarily best.
5. Concise language is effective: don’t have three sentences when one carefully-written sentence will do.
6. Appropriate text design will make your content easy to scan and read. Reading on a computer monitor is very different from reading print publications. So like graphic design, text design for the Web is not at all like design for print.
7. Most visitors to your site will scan your content rather than read it word-for-word. Your text should be designed so that it is easy to scan quickly no big blocks of text — no long paragraphs, and the margins should not be too narrrow!
8. Headings and subheadings are essential both for user-friendliness and for search engine friendliness.

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