Bad Content

"Content is King" is not a new saying. But it gets said over and over because content is the purpose and the driving force of the web.

Content is the purpose of your pages, the meat beneath the gravy, the reason why people come to your site, and the reason why they will, or won't, come back.

Content can be images, information, software, instructions, a service, a product, or anything else that gives a site visitor something they consider to be of value. Content is the value in the website.

Flash design, links, headers and logos, site layout, CSS, HTML, PHP, SEO, NONE of those, are content. They are merely a framework to hold the content.

Good quality content lives up to its promise. If you have a website about shoes, then someone interested in shoes should be able to enter on any page, and know that your site is about shoes, and that if they click a link that says it is about shoelaces, that they will find information about shoelaces, or products, or downloads, or whatever. But something they will value about shoes. If it fails to deliver on that promise, you just lost a visitor. Permanently.

Good quality content has impact. It may be the "ah-ha" factor, the "wow" factor, or the "YES!" factor. When you give someone the key to understanding something they did not previously understand, or impress them with the value of an item you have available, or express an opinion that they can strongly agree with, then you got them! Your site then has indisputable value to them.

Good site design will coordinate with and compliment the content - it is a seamless extension of the content if you got it right. Bad site design will not lower the quality of the content, but it can change the visitor's perception of the content. There is a whole lot of neutral ground in between the two extremes.

Many sites with bad content did not set out to be that way. They may have elevated design above content, or placed Search Engine Optimization as more important than high quality content. The sad thing about that is, when you have good quality content, SEO pretty much takes care of itself, and when you start with content, and design for the content, the site design comes together more easily too.

There is nothing more important in creating a high quality website, than starting and ending with high quality content. Offer people something of genuine value - it does not matter whether you are offering it free, or at a price they can see. Either way, it has to have solid value to them, and be recognizable as good.

Written by Laura Wheeler