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Everyone keeps reiterating the same term over and over: “Content is king” has almost become a mantra which writers of web copy sing from the rooftops. And they’re right to do so!
Whether your content is provided in textual form, vivid imagery or some beautifully implemented audio and video media, ensuring your website’s content is up-to-scratch will help you turn visitors into customers.
When you come to producing the content that will help visitors understand what the website is about, the following tips may give you some relevant advice to keeping your users hooked.
51. There is more to content than text. Providing polls, infographics, or interactive elements that have content-based value can help improve the interest and readability of on-page information.
52. People respond to engaging prose.
Copyright, Content Licensing and Legalities
53. If you’re intending to build for other people, ensure you have some good solid contracts to work from. You don’t want to be unprepared if the client refuses to meet their obligations.
54. Creating paperwork such as invoices, receipts of purchase, questionnaires (for contract work) and other useful materials will reduce your workload if you start doing freelance jobs.
55. Word of mouth constitutes a binding contract, though it’s harder to prove you shouldn’t say you can or will do something unless you fully intend to follow through what you state.
56. All services should have good terms of service, privacy policy and copyright agreements. It’s important that your end-users know what you expect from them (and that works in reverse)!
57. You don’t need to have a copyright statement on your website (though it’s good as a reference). Ignorance of intellectual property does not qualify as a valid excuse.
58. When deciding how to license your finished design, you may want to check out creative commons or open source licenses; they’re pre-written and flexible (which is great).
59. A cheap way of writing agreements or contracts for your website is to examine others and then write your own based on it. You can save yourself a lot of money in potential legal fees.
60. Avoid legal jargon whenever possible and simply state outright what you want to say in an agreement. Your clients will be more likely to read what you say if they can understand it,
61. If you write your own contracts, it might pay to have them read over by a lawyer to get them as watertight as possible. Verifying is often cheaper than having it custom written.
62. Accessibility statements aren’t as important as they used to be (as being natively accessible is more of a requirement), but providing one may be useful to your website’s audience.
Content Formats and Considerations
63. Get the hang of compression — whether it’s using GZIP for content, caching for external files or squeezing extra bytes from images and media. It will increase the speed of your website.
64. Consider the best image format for what you are trying to achieve, while GIF makes for good basic animations, JPEG or its less lossy friend PNG will be better for high-resolution photos. Read The Comprehensive Guide to Saving Images for the Web for more information.
65. Be careful as to what you use images to portray. Not everyone can see images (like search engines) and this may present readability problems if you use them in place of text.
66. When adding video, audio or graphics into your site, make sure alternative content is available for those who cannot take advantage of these mediums due to accessibility issues.
Images
67. Opacity in images is a tricky issue with Internet Explorer. There are fixes for issues in IE6, but you should remember that only full alpha transparency has issues, not single colors.
68. Your logo is one of the most important aspects of your website as it’s what people will recognise you for. Therefore, it pays to have a good, memorable one created for your brand.
69. While the favicon is one of the smallest graphics you’re likely to encounter on a website, it provides a fantastically unique way of gaining recognition in bookmarks and social networks.
70. Producing an Apple touch icon at 57×57 pixels can be useful for users of the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch who can proudly display your site in their home screens (using web clip).
71. There are loads of sites that provide free stock images, audio and video if you’re not much of a pixel-pusher.
Content Writing
72. Even if you’re not an articulate individual, trying to ensure that your spelling and grammar are correct should be at the top of your agenda.
73. If you’re at a loss for what to write, taking a break or using one of the many techniques to help remove writer’s block can prove indispensible to the content creation process. See the Content Strategy category for tips.
74. A simple way to reduce the complexity of content is to take what you have and boil it down to 50%. It may seem a lot, but reductionism can seriously help eliminate the waffle!
75. Writing your content before you start designing your website can help you better approach the coding stage as you can pick the right elements that describe your content’s value.
76. Content is king. If you sacrifice the quality of the content for the design of the website, your visitors may likely hit the back button in their browser and never return as a result.
77. Much of writing for the web is down to practice. Don’t be afraid to start off small with the likes of Twitter or forum posts before building up your credibility as a web content writer.
78. Making content fun and involving is important to being successful. While dry humourless copy might get across the point, being quirky will emote passion.
79. Never be afraid to ask for help and feedback or get colleagues to proofread what you have to say. Often, a bit of critique will help you become a better professional.
80. When linking to another website, ensure you notify the visitor of how the target site relates to the content or element of the website so they don’t end up at an undesired location.
81. Break your content down into easy to manage segments. Using unordered lists, for example, can help increase the content readability.
82. Fluff and poor quality marketing speak is unnecessary. Always keep to the point and avoid redundant technical language. We all hate junk and in the recycling bin it all belongs.
83. Ensure that what you say is factually correct. Citing references will give your words added credibility.
84. Don’t plagiarise or steal other people’s content. If you find people stealing yours, it’s worth taking the time to learn how to send DMCA takedown notices and cease and desist letters.
85. When writing content of your own, simplicity is valuable. If you can strike a balance between being informative and being overly wordy, you could avoid wasting your reader’s time.
86. Don’t span long documents over multiple pages if you can avoid it. Such practices can reduce the readability of content as readers will be forced to break their natural flow to jump pages.
87. If you’re planning on having a blog, ensure that you state if you’re reviewing something and have been paid to do so.
88. There are so many fantastic CMS solutions (i.e. WordPress). If you find less technical people are going to contribute to a site you make, they can be ideal in removing some complexity and speeding up content production.
89. Consistency is important with everything you write. Maintaining a core set of standards and values helps ensure regularity.
90. Always try to put across information in a friendly and non-aggressive tone. Being overly sarcastic or rude can lead to arguments that can degrade the value of your content.
91. Feedback can be just as important in content writing as the written material itself. Using blog comments, for example, can give entertaining and potentially informative extra reading.
92. Write for people, not search engines. Your users are more important than your Google PageRank.
93. If you plan on providing translated content for international users, nothing beats a human translator. With that said, there are some decent translation tools out there.
Multimedia Content
94. If you create a podcast for your website, a good compression-to-quality ratio is 96kbs MP3 (for voice recordings). Large file sizes are a pain, and at this level, you can save a lot of bandwidth.
95. MP3 is arguably the most compatible audio format around. If you’re providing alternative formats like OGG or FLAC, then ensure an MP3 version exists for more restrictive audio players.
96. Embedding Windows Media Player or Apple QuickTime into a page may have problems if people don’t have the players installed. Flash has a higher market penetration than both.
97. Automatically playing music is a sin — it’s annoying, so don’t do it.
98. Remember that Flash-dependent components are not reliable: People with vision and hand-mobility impairments limit them in accessing a lot of Fla
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