Whether you are designing a new website, or redesigning an oldie, creating good and effective content can be a long and daunting task. Your website is built up from the foundation of your content, ensuring that you get the best indexing on Google and experience for viewers.
If you’re redesigning your old website, it’s easy to fall into the dark pit of recycling old content from your previous site. This is would be the equivalent of putting a fresh coat of paint on an old car and forgetting to check the engine, to put it simply; it isn’t going to work as well as it could. Do it some justice, and create some fresh content for your fresh site.
So the big question; where do you start? It can feel like you’re staring at a blank canvas, but don’t worry, we’ve got a little process which could help give your new website the content it deserves.
1. Research your audience
Review and research will help you to understand what your audience is looking for when they come to your website. Understanding what your audience needs will go hand in hand with creating the right visual design for your website. It will help your visitors to follow a path and keep things streamline. If you’re working with a design agency, they will probably have a good understanding to map this out.
So you’ve done your research, but how does this transform into written content? The key is to know the questions your audience have before they come to your website. By knowing these, you are able to provide answers to your visitors, and anything not answering their question can be put it in the bin!
If your visitors are looking for a cleaning service, during research your should find that they need to following information:
Your rates, your location, your contact details.
These then turn into questions:
What are your rates? Where are you located? How can I contact you?
2. Heirarchy
Now you have all your questions and answers, it’s time to form your hierarchy. This is key to structure and piece together your site content.
By ranking your questions in order of importance, you are already beginning the process of hierarchy. This means that from the minute they arrive on your website, they already begin to receive information they are looking for. For example:
Where are you located? If you are not local to them they do not need to know your cleaning rates.
What are your rates? If you are too expensive it doesn’t matter how they can contact you.
How can I contact you? If they are happy with the information they will follow through this process.
3. Questions into pages
Now you can start to create your sitemap, you can do this by writing your question on separate bits of paper to help create what is know as a “wireframe”.
It is always a good idea to consult with your designers through this process as they would look at it from design industry standards. E.g. Most website will hold contact information within the header & footer for easy access, although this may be the key information people are looking for.
4. Create your content
Those question and answers create your content, you just need to expand on them. It doesn’t have to be direct, but ensure that the content is clear and easy to understand. You don’t want to overwhelm them with too much information.
5. Upload, review & evaluate
Once placed on your website, it’s always good to get reviews and give you some feedback – this may even be from your design agency.
Getting feedback from your website regularly is a useful way to evaluate how your website will evolve. Your audience may change over time, and it makes sense for your website to adapt to that.
We use Google Analytics to determine what content on your site is being interacted with by the user and which is not, we then repurpose that content isn’t working into something that will.
Is creating your content taking up too much of your time? Or are you not sure where to start?
…Talk to us. We can help with the website process from the beginning through to the end including our copywriter Tim on hand to help with the content side of your site.
So get in touch today to arrange a free chat about all things content creation. We can come to you or you can come to us, we make a great cuppa!
