Written by:RedLorryHost
3/6/2010 9:30 AM 

In a recent discussion with a potential supplier, on something totally not website related, he made a valid point to me which I immediately thought is something that would be a very valid point to make to Red Lorry customers, both potential and current. 

The point he made something along the lines of, we can provide you with the tools to do this job and do it well, but the most important part of getting something like this to work properly for you is the content, and without quality content you are not going to get the full benefit of this product.

This got me thinking about website’s, and especially the website tools offered to you by Red Lorry. We offer you a top notch website framework, that can do wonderful things and allow you to build a fantastic website, but unless you load it with quality content you are not going to get the mileage out of your website that you should and your website will not work for you.

The importance your website's content is easily highlighted by the amount of search results that you get from a quick Google search of something simple like “website content tips”. I will save you the time the answer is 187 000 000. 

Imagine a user searching for a product such as furniture, the results page that display’s had millions of results displayed, again I will save you the time, on Google it is 167 000 000 results, now assuming that the user opens your site first, the other 166 999 999 website are still at the back of his mind, so you need to capture that user as the page loads with relevant, clear information presented in clear manageable chunk’s, other wise you will loose that user.

So how do you do this, according to Crawford Killian, author of Writing for the Web, 100 words in one solid block of text is a symptom of paragraphosis, in which the eye becomes unable to focus or track through a mass of type.

Keeping this in mind you have about 10 seconds to grab the users attention and 55 seconds to develop and understanding of you business or product, to do this you need to follow these points I found in an article by Cris Rominger called Website Content Tips: 6 Ways to Grab Readers’ Attention

1. Chunk Content
2. Use instructive headings
3. Format for scannability
4. Use anchor points
5. Be clear and concise
6. Employ good design

 When you are writing you content, keep the following three things in mind about the users on your site,

1. They are lazy, therefore reading is too much work.
2. They are skeptical.
3. They are impatient.

So now you have the readers attention, and they are interested in your product. Another benefit of quality content is that a user that is impressed by your site, product or business, will want to share it with other Internet user, not only will this get your site more users, but it will also increase your position on search results on the various search engines.

You need to make it easy for users to share pages and products on your site, to do this you either need to add something that allows users to easily email a friend the URL to the page they are on by using something like Engage: Tell A Friend, provided for free on your Red Lorry website, or by giving them the ability to submit your site to a social bookmarking site such as Facebook, Twitter or Digg. Again Red Lorry provide you this functionality for free via the SharePost Module available to you on your Red Lorry Website.

If you feel that you do not have the time to invest in you website content you also have the option of hiring a website copywriter, a service also offered by Red Lorry, to create, edit and format your websites content

As a business tool your website is probably the best employee that your will ever have, it is multifunctional and omnipotent. It is a receptionist giving out directions to your offices and a sales rep that never sleep or takes extended lunches, at your expense and it can see multiple customers at once. 

Imagine if your receptionist did not quite give out the correct directions to your offices, or spoke unclearly, or a sales rep that did not know his product well enough or gave out too little information about your products or even too much. The same is true for your website. You need to get out the right information to the user. Good quality content will lead to more users on your website which will lead to more business for you.

some content referenced from

1. Website Content Tips: 6 Ways to Grab Readers’ Attention - Cris Rominge
2. Website Content Writing Tips - Menthes

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