Tips to make the most out of entering your own content on the web.

Written by Nicole Braseth Tuesday, 18 August 2009 14:24

So, you have a website. You want to update it frequently and be in control of your own destiny, er, website without having to depend on someone else, so you chose a Content Management System (CMS) option. Good for you!

But in updating your own content, one must keep in mind some important things. First and foremost your website is an extension of you and your company or organization's image and it's important that it leave a good impression.

Some things to remember:

• Spell-check. Ask someone who is good at proofing to look over your content for spelling and grammar errors before you publish it (sometimes the spell-checker tool is not fool-proof). A website full of spelling errors will deter potential clients from taking you seriously.

• Writing for the web is a different beast altogether than writing content for a brochure or a report. Take the time to learn what's appropriate for the web. Too much content at once is going to scare off your audience. Break it up into smaller sections, create blog entries with "Read More..." links in order to showcase the most important paragraph first, and then have the rest of the content in the full entry. Be relevant, eliminate "fluff." Use the inverted pyramid approach: the most important content goes in the first paragraph, this allows a viewer who scans for information to get everything they need quickly.

• Use punctuation and spacing sparingly and properly. Don't go overboard with exclamation marks (there are exceptions to every rule, but if your intent is a professional look, then "!!!" will not support that goal). Figure out the right way to use apostrophes. Ensure there is only one space after a period (not two, this bad habit dates back to typewriters and doesn't have a place on your computer).

• Use links! Create links that actively tell you what they link to, as opposed to "Click here" which is non-descriptive and does nothing to help your SEO.

• If a link is a download (of a .pdf for example), then be clear about that. People can get annoyed if the download window pops up when they were expecting to be taken to a new webpage. On that same note, the majority of your content shouldn’t be external downloads. If there is content that is too heavy for your website, take some of the more important points out of the download to use as an introduction to the corresponding file. This can also have the effect of making the download more trustworthy. Many people won’t download a file that they didn’t expect to be downloading, or one of which they don’t know the contents.

They may seem like little things, but taking the time to craft and perfect how your content is displaying is going to impress upon your audience that you are a professional.