Hot New Website Killed By Poor Content
Web design is a great occupational field. It’s full of opportunity. At times it’s overwhelming due to the high demand for good, quality driven web designers. But I’m just wondering…doesn’t it ‘irk’ you sometimes when you have put together a great looking, customer oriented, feature packed website only to see the client fill their web pages with junk? They paid for a great website and killed it with poor content. What can you do about it? One suggestion is to add the ability to create web content for your customers too.
When you do a search on Google for ‘web content’, it generates close to 200,000,000 results. It’s obviously an important topic. Because of this, my recommendation is to seek out and team up with a good copywriter. Look for and secure the services of a qualified writer who can create relevant, readable, well formed text that will complement your web design services. Keep in mind that the text they create needs to assist in keeping customers on the website. I’ll discuss some of the critical components of content in another article soon. Add appropriate pricing and encourage clients to let you help them create verbiage and content that works well for their company. There are a myriad of companies out there that post their prices for creating content on their websites. Make sure your pricing is competitive and ensure the customer that putting together an entire package all at the same time is beneficial to them.
As an example of how well great design and great content work together, I wanted to use a friend’s site to point out the effectiveness of this approach. PrintBusinessCards.com is a site that has been around since 2000. This site re-launched in 2006 with a completely new design. At the same time, they immediately started publishing good, relevant pages full of good content related to their industry…business cards. Over an 8 month period their page rank has increased, their Alexa ranking has dramatically increased…breaking them into the top 100,000, and their pages come up higher in Google searches across the board. All of this is a result of huge organic growth and has ultimately boosted sales dramatically at the same time. This site is a prime example of filling a website with great, relevant content. At the same time, they also launched a blog where they have consistently published good business cards related articles, relevant tips, announcements about new pages, and press releases. The blog has become another good contributor for attracting customers to their site. The blog is well written and always points readers to various features of their main website. Again, this is a prime example of creating good content that benefits the customer. Blogs are a great way to build long term results for clients. It takes time though. The general consensus is at least a year of good, consistent articles on a blog before the main site starts seeing results. This is true for PrintBusinessCards.com too. Their blog now has a page rank of 3 and is climbing on its own through the rankings while at the same time funneling quite a few potential customers every day to the main site. Design, function, and content. These 3 critical components are all displayed on this site. Their presence on the web is increasing everyday. It’s a great example of how teaming up with a good copywriter can enhance the design and function of a website.
So, as web designers, my recommendation is to include the creation of good, relevant, quality content as part of your pricing and services. In doing this, you should attract more customers while creating more satisfied customers at the same time. Again, as I mentioned before, I plan on discussing some of the critical components that are comprised in quality content for any website. If you have other examples of websites where content, function, and design work together very well, please let me know. I’d like to check it out!
