Writing Good Online Content

Posted by Trent on September 04, 2008Permalink

Many of our clients who are outfitted with an install of one of our tailored CMS products utilize a news / posting / blogging element for keeping visitors up to date. Here are a few basic tips for writing good online content.

Get to the Point

It is important to recognize that most people are going to skim your post initially, then determine if they are going to devote any more precious time into reading it.  Keep posts brief and to the point.  If all you have is a 2-3 sentence announcement, don't bother with padding it with pointless fluff verbiage.  If a post is relatively long, give readers a good descriptive title or intro sentence so they can easily grasp what you're getting at.

Create Links

People like to click on stuff. If you are writing a post about your favorite band or favorite conference center, why not link to it. It will make your post more engaging and help out your friends & colleagues further their web presence. Heck, they might even return the favor. To create a link, simply highlight the text you'd like to serve as a clickable link and click the hyperlink button and paste in the url you'd like visitors to be taken to. Hyperlink buttons look usually look like a link in a chain.

Post Regularly

How often do you think people visit your site? How often would you like for them to visit? It is a good rule of thumb to post according to how often you’d like them to visit. If you are a band with fans, you might be able to post daily and have visitors clicking around a couple of times a day. Businesses and Churches might try and keep content fresh on a weekly basis so visitors get in the habit of seeing something new about every 7 days.

Be Careful When Copying and Pasting From a Text Editor

Realize that websites are code. Clean code ensures sites display correctly and load quickly. Take a look at Exhibit A and Exhibit B.

Exhibit A is a sample of a post cleanly typed out in your post creation window.

Exhibit B is the same post directly pasted from a text editor like Microsoft word.

As you can see, the first paragraph of this post has much less coding "junk" in A than in B. Text editors that provide for an extensive amount of text formatting tend to do more harm. If you are intent upon using a text editor and pasting your content, simple editors like wordpad, notepad, or textedit that create .txt files are typically better.

Link to Files

Most of our client CMS products come with a file uploader, often found in a “resources” section for files like PDFs or MP3s. Instead of trying to embed or paste these types of files into a news post, upload the file to resources and link to it in your post.

You Don't Have to Delete Older Posts

Your news/posting section shuffles older posts down, placing the latest news at the top of your feed. Its ok (and a good idea) to allow posts to archive.

Don't Forget That We're Here For You.

We know that creating great online content isn't the easiest thing in the world. Feel free to contact us with questions.