AM Design

How to Prepare Material for your Website

Planning ahead and organising yourself  to prepare material for your website is the most important first step you can take. If you have little or no idea how to do this, you need to be sure your web designer assists you with the process by providing advice. Your website is not just an online business card or digital brochure for your business. It’s debatably the strongest inbound marketing tool that your business has.

The best way you can enhance the functionality of your website is by publishing useful and original content which provides search engines with relevant information about your business so they can rank your website accordingly thereby placing it before more searchers, and provides visitors with immediate access to details about your business that they are most likely to be seeking.

It is not a web designers job to write your content, unless you employ him/her to research your industry and write your website content on your behalf. This will cost more of course, but has many advantages. Paying someone else to write your website content will free up your time; a professional web designer with good internet marketing skills will write content that is optimised for search engines, and also ensure that your content is original (not ‘borrowed’ from another website) and not likely to be black-listed by search engines.

If professionally prepared content for your website is not in your budget, then here are some ways in which you can gather and create original content that inspires your audience.

prepare material for your websiteCreating Visual Engagement

At least 60% of your data should be visually attractive. Otherwise, you are under serious risk of losing out on audience interest. Statistically you have just a few seconds in which to convince visitors to your website that they should stay and find out more about what you have to offer. You should have the resources and the foresight to create data banks of relevant visuals and graphic images that somehow add value to your web design. When it comes to a website, it is absolutely true that a picture speaks louder than a thousand words.

Visual content can be of three major types – videos, photos and graphic files. You might also build up data banks of charts, graphs that are relevant to your business. Graphical images will provoke powerful calls to action - ie prompt visitors to click through to pages with further information, to contact you, or to encourage purchase of your goods or services.

Update your content regularly

All major search engines will rapidly lose interest in your data if you do not update it regularly. While collating material for your website, you should keep in mind that you have to keep adding to that material.

If your audience is intelligent, they will sniff out whether your data is contemporary or picked up from an archive. Inbound marketing leads have constantly delivered better results at lower costs than outbound marketing strategies. Collect material that pulls your website visitors towards your business!

Originality is the Key

When it comes to website content and data, being original pays off well. Firstly, search engines like Google are highly appreciative of original content. Secondly your readers will immediately understand and acknowledge stuff that has not been on the market before. Compelling and powerful content can make a big difference to your website traffic volumes.

The ultimate purpose of your web design is to attract business and all your material collecting endeavours should aim towards inviting visitors to want your goods or service, to stay longer and find out more, and to make a decision to purchase your products or service or contact you.

Think up new ways of engaging customer attention if you really want to make your website successful.

Follow benchmarks

Benchmarks are there for a purpose. They constantly remind the audience what the best practices are and they motivate businesses to streamline their quality control processes until that level is reached.

If you are not sure what a benchmark is, Wikipedia states that “Benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to best practices from other industries”. You can read more about benchmarking here.

Give your readers exposure to industry benchmarks and provide material that conforms to these high standards. Your readers will be satisfied that the information they are consuming belongs to a certain quality.

Pick contemporary, exclusive information libraries for collecting data like business journals, white papers and statistical reports.

Consider your web designer

Don’t expect your web designer to make sense of your material if it is not properly collated into documents which represent the navigation of your website. In other words, create a document for each page and put the material for that page into that document.

Make sure you provide notes which explain anything you need your web designer to understand. Better still, provide a covering brief.

If you aren’t sure how to provide material, don’t be afraid to ask.

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Call us today on 07 5345 6011 or 0418 723 886 for more information.

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