Make Sure Your Content is Appropriately Displayed!

We talked over the weekend about a site that was badly put together and difficult to navigate. One of the things I mentioned was that there were two articles about the origin of the site buried very deep within the site, and badly presented.

I didn’t mention that the idea behind the articles was very good!

They detailed from two different view points how the idea of the site got started, what the inspiration was and how it was brought to life. It was actually interesting reading, once you got past all the hard returns and tiny print to see what it said.

These articles could have been a real handy tool to generate interest. Instead they languished alone and unutilized in the equivalent of a storage closet under the stairs.

Having interesting, personable content on your site, especially if it is an entrepreneurial sales site, is sometimes the best thing for grabbing a customers attention and making them sit up and take notice.

If the two articles in question had been condensed into one story line, fleshed out with a photo or two and laid out in a pleasant, easy to read format with a font big enough to actually read… who knows what kind of attention they might get!

There is a reason most of the best websites divide the screen into sections. The header, left, right, and footer, with the central section the largest. There is a reason for the right and left margin! It only makes your text and info in the center about a thousand times easier to read.

Even if you don’t have anything to put on the sides (for example, you don’t want to distract with advertising) you can still fill them in with an appropriate restful color, preferably darker than your central background.

This will help your focus text pop and make your column narrower, which lends itself to the shorter paragraphs appropriate to web based content. It’s the difference between reading a short article in Google Docs at full screen, and reading the same article at half width screen!

Take a minute and fiddle with it, centering your text on the page and deciding which alignment looks best. Fool with background colors, text size and fonts; experiment with paragraphing to present the most pleasing view.

Once you have finished, think twice before attempting to monetize by embedding links in every other word. This is so distracting when you are reading a piece of work meant to flow. It’s OK if you have one or two pages on your site with just terrific content!

Make sure you do have a ‘home’ or ‘back’ link on the page, however, so they can return to browsing your site afterwards. You want to keep people on your site as long as possible, to increase your chances of conversion.

Once you have made sure your content is well displayed, link to your articles from a few other spots to encourage traffic. This will help spark interest in your site as a whole. Include an internal link from your home page as well – something along the lines of ‘How it All Began’.

Your content is important to the ultimate success of your site, and that means all your content – if it is worth putting up, it is worth doing right!