Web content for business

1. A practical guide to creating and managing
web content to reach your customers and
market your business

2. ★ Itʼs the “stuff” on the web site
★ Written word
★ Imagery
★ Videos
★ Itʼs how the content is organized

3. Your content is the most important
asset of your site

4. Your content is the most important asset
of your site
Itʼs how you influence people, get
customers, make sales

5. Your content is the most important asset
of your site
Itʼs how you influence people, get
customers, make sales
Itʼs the whole reason we view websites

9. ★ Search engine optimization helps people
find your site; itʼs not why theyʼre there
or what they do there
★ The Google and Bing crawlers are not
your customers
★ Search optimization shines when it
works with and through good content
strategy

11. ★ Design influences image, including
authority and professionalism

12. ★ Design influences image, including
authority and professionalism
★ Design both guides and colors how we
understand content

13. ★ Design influences image, including
authority and professionalism
★ Design both guides and colors how we
understand content
★ It must do all of this based on, and
through, good content

15. ★ A prerequisite for a content
management system is content

16. ★ A prerequisite for a content
management system is content
★ The purpose of a CMS is to provide a
system to put your content strategy into
effect

17. ★ A prerequisite for a content
management system is content
★ The purpose of a CMS is to provide a
system to put your content strategy into
effect
★ It will enforce and automate whatever
strategy you have, even a haphazard
non-strategy

19. ★ Youʼre starting a web project
★ Youʼve engaged a web designer
★ And youʼre planning out your content
against your business plan, with the web
designer

20. “We launched it a year... three years ago?”
“Content? The web designer showed me
where to type what I wanted.”
“We did SEO, thatʼs all that matters, right?”
“An industry colleague reviewed the content
and said it all made sense to her.”

22. ★ Hire designer, make some design decisions,
create site with standard pages
★ Delay launch (3 weeks, 3 months, or yet
longer) while you get your content together
★ Stare at content holes in your site and try to
fill with stuff copied directly from existing
marketing material

23. ★ Guide rails on how to write the copy,
what images to include
★ Guidelines for how and when to update

24. ★ Just as design is consistent across the
site, so should the content be consistent
(choice of language, images, etc)
★ Clear content
★ Coherent content

26. ★ This is an investment, know your goal
★ What outcome do you want from your
site?
★ For people to understand what you do
★ For people to understand your
expertise
★ To make sales online

27. ★ Consider the whole point of your site
(site goals)
★ Consider who your audience is
★ Consider what your audience wants
★ Consider why your audience wants that
★ Consider where your audience is

28. ★ Know who your customers are
★ Your content should be filtered through
their domain before your own
★ It should make sense for readers,
directing them based on your site goals
★ You may need to balance different
audiences

30. ★ What information they want and how
much of they want
★ Are people coming to research
thoroughly? To get a concept of who you
are?
★ Think “features”

31. ★ Why do they want what they want? Not
a Zen question
★ This is the question that will guide not
just want they want, but what they need
★ Think “benefits”

32. ★ The missing “where” question
★ Device, geography, moment
★ Are they spontaneous, incidental, or
directed visits? New, rare, or regular?
★ This question mattered little 10 years
ago, will matter even more in 1 year

34. That restaraunt might Give me a minute, I’ll try
have catering. I’ll research to find their hours and
how they explain their see what their menu is
approach and experience. like.

35. OMFG.
They sound incredibly
A Flash intro? The menu is
professional and expert in
in PDF!? WTF. Let’s just
this kind of event.
try that other place...

38. ★ Analytics: not just for search marketing
★ Cheap (free) and easy to install
★ Simple stats about where people are
coming from, why, what theyʼre reading,
and whether your content is “sticking”
★ Google Analytics, Piwik, + many more

39. ★ Conduct a basic content audit
★ What pages, sections, images, videos,
interactive modules are you using?
★ Describe each one including its
message and voice

40. ★ Your tone should reflect you and your
business
★ The message should pertain to your
goals
★ Tone and message should be consistent
★ Both should also take into account your
audience

41. ★ Basic, good copy writing rules apply
★ To be concise is to be wonderful
★ Good marketing copy does not sound
like marketing copy
★ Your website is not a whitepaper
★ Cut out the bullshit

42. ★ Remove extraneous sections and pages
from the site tree (navigation links)
★ Break apart logically distinct sections

43. ★ Not all content needs to be updated
★ But if it does, establish guidelines
★ Decide which content will be updated,
when, and by whom - and be realistic

45. Wellfire Interactive is a web design and development firm in the
Washington, DC metropolitan area.
At Wellfire Interactive we design and build websites and applications
for our customers with their business - and their customers - in mind.
Our clients include non-profits advocating for better democracy and
businesses working to bring new services to life over the web.
We often use Django, we always use current web standards, and we
definitely like a challenge.
We’d love to help you with your web content, no matter where you
are in the process: from content audit and strategy to deploying an
appropriately designed CMS.
Contact us at wellfire@wellfireinteractive.com or 571-482-8801
@wellfire

46. Credits
Owner & Producer: Wellfire Interactive
Author: Ben Lopatin
Permission is granted to save, copy, print, or otherwise redistribute.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0
Unported License.
All photos are used courtesy of their owners under Creative Commons attribution
license or are public domain.
Slide 10: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_t_in_dc/4126515222/
Slide 14: http://www.flickr.com/photos/steve-jackson/3462844331/
Slide 18: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stawarz/2398513475/
Slide 21: http://www.flickr.com/photos/learnscope/4397300890/
Slide 25: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6c/Hydra_04.jpg
Slide 29: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderlane/3262660432/
Slide 33-35: http://www.flickr.com/photos/zak/84082961/
Slide 33-35: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nealrosenau/4107363173/
Slide 36: http://www.flickr.com/photos/alaivani/3694205702/