Website Content

'Content is King'. Repeat after me, 'Content is King'. Equally relevant is K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid).

Words are the reason for your website. To stand a chance of success, it has to create credibility between yourself and your unknown visitor who has only your website to convince him that you are worth doing business with.

On the home page no less I have seen the 'Mission Statement', the 'Vision' and nothing (really, nothing) about the business. What are these people thinking? Do they set out to alienate themselves intentionally?

You have SIX seconds to grab your visitor after the page download. What absolutely must appear on the home page is the following:

• Who you are;
• What you do;
• Where you do it;
• What the visitor can do (perhaps);
• How much it costs (perhaps).

Talking of which, failure to identify your audience is a common mistake. Large corporations are also guilty of deciding what the visitors to their website should read. 'We know what you want and we're going to give it to you'.

Clients labour under the illusion that visitors to THEIR website will luxuriate amongst its manifold blessings for an hour. Of course their websites will be treated with same impatience as the millions of others. If you are generating your own content, prepare a draft and then edit it to half its size.

Now edit that to half its size and you will have the right text length. Mark Twain once said that "The only good word is a deleted one" - follow the dictum.