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Make the content - copy writing
Making the content - the
difficult bit!
Content is very difficult to produce. Because meaningful content
is difficult and time consuming, this presumably may be one
reason why content rich sites are rewarded with better search
engine placement in many cases.
We often get companies asking
us to produce the site and suddenly realising that they actually
have to provide us with text to go on the pages. The following
information how we encourage our customers to provide useful
text for their sites. See
also useful sections / page types for your site.
Do you sell yourself
online? - the process of getting that sale
Firstly establish what it is that you are trying to achieve.
Are you trying to get a sale, repeat visitors, or get an enquiry?
Once you have established what you are trying to achieve,
you must as speedily as possible get the customer to the point
of required response.
I find it useful advice
to talk yourself through the sales process or task:
How would you sell yourself,
your product or your site to a person you were talking to,
rather than who was viewing the site?
In the case of non product
based sites, how would you explain the site to them?
Click
here for more in-depth advice on how to write the copy.
Write the text!
Just get on and write it all down without being overly critical
and once you are done, print it out and start to re read the
text. This can then often provide you with the basis for a
whole site as sections of the process will become more obvious
using this method.
Split into sections
/ pages
Once you have the text in front of you, splitting the process
into sections (topics) and pages within these will reveal
both the structure of the site necessary and also a path through
to the desired result. It will give you information on how
to persuade the customer to buy from you because you must
remember that in order to be effective the process must lead
the visitor through your pages and keep them interested, ultimately
leading to the response.
Mark your printed notes with
the sections and headings and any corrections and then use
these notes to rearrange the text on your screen within the
headings for the page, add in corrections, notes etc.. You
can then re print this and further reorganise, add in further
notes or sections as you wish. At this stage the structure
of the site will have become more obvious to you.
Start to make the pages
When I begin splitting this up into pages for a site I find
it useful to place the text into my html editor and start
to save the whole page as the new section names and work my
way down the sections, saving as I go a page for each section.
I then work back through these saved pages, deleting information
relevant to other sections and keeping the relevant text.
If these pages are still too large I will repeat the process
again with the section pages, producing pages off these.
Page names - keep it
logical
Keep the page names logical and you will then be able to pick
these pages up and link them together. For instance, this
pages is 'content-copy-writing.html'. All the pages in this
section are also held in a folder called web-design-tips.
This aids the designers in linking between pages. Imagine
if you are the designer producing a page and you want to make
a link for someone to follow to this article, you just browse
to web-design-tips and find content-copy-writing.html - simple!
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