Content Writing & Copywriting Blog

Content first or design?

May 10, 2008 6 Comments »

Nice discussion going on, on Jeffrey’s blog, regarding what should come first: the design of the website, or its content. He stresses that designers should deeply study the content of the website before getting on with the design.

I have had experience from both the sides (oh! this sounds kinky). I have made websites, and now I create content. For me it’s never been a hard and fast rule. It depends on the focus of the website. Of course it helps if you know what sort of content the website is going to carry.

When designing websites one should keep in mind that it’s not the design that plays a dominant role; it’s the content, because after all you communicate through your content. Of course design should be pleasing and if you are a web designer or a visual artist then the visual elements on your website should be attractive to look at, but if you are a writer, or a consultant, or providing a product or a service through your website, then the most important thing is the message, the content. The entire design should evolve around the content.

The design is like a gadget, take for instance a TV set. No matter how cool-looking your TV set is, if there is no program worth-watching, the TV set is of no use.

TimesOnline is making 200 years of its content available online

May 09, 2008 No Comments »

Via the beta version of TimesOnline, according to this link at Journalism.com, you can go through the archives of the content produced by The Times, Sunday Times and TimesOnline published since 1785. The archive will be free to its users, initially, and then perhaps they will be charging a fee for the access. Recently the Wall Street Journal made its online content free and I think other online publications will soon be following suit. Anyway, it’ll be quite fascinating to go through the old archives.

What sort of content should go on your blog or website?

May 09, 2008 1 Comment »

When it comes to your website or blog, what matters to you the most, the quality of the content, or the quantity?

The SEO experts say you must have lots of pages on your website in order to fair well on the search engines. The more content you have, the greater is the chance of attaining the “right” keyword density.

Although your rankings don’t merely depend on your keyword density, to an extent this works. I have noticed whenever I put more content on my content writing website, my traffic increases and so do the business queries (hence I’m planning to make it a regular business promotion exercise). But it doesn’t mean your website should become a dumping ground for every sort of corporate content and some kind of auditing and planning is necessarily, as rightly pointed out by Andy Budd in his recent post.

When clients approach me for their content writing projects I’ve observed they rarely have a plan. They just have a basic idea of how many pages the website requires and at the most, the titles, and the keywords they think should be appropriate to target for. Since 90% of the clients don’t have a content strategy, I have started offering it as a separate service (of course I’m charging for it). Now I tell them what content should be there. A website must have a clear content orientation.

Last year I worked with a client who sent me an Excel sheet listing around 150 pages. All the pages were clearly marked for different sections and he had a clear idea of what the individual page was going to achieve for his corporate website, and I think that is the right approach to take.

What about the blog? I think it’s OK to have non-relevant blog posts now and then as long as your overall content sticks to the theme of your blog. For instance if you publish a blog on web design and development, it’s OK to share your experience of cooking a chicken with your audience; but it doesn’t mean that after every second post you begin to share your cooking secrets with them because it will totally derail the primary purpose of your blog: showcasing your skill as a web developer.

Just wondering

May 09, 2008 1 Comment »

How come people selling you ideas and secrets that are earning them 500000 to 1000000 dollars yearly have such lousy websites? Even their copywriting sucks most of the time.

When’s the best time to post your blog entry

May 03, 2008 5 Comments »

Does it matter when you publish your blog posts? On what days? This post at Read/Write Web says, according to a study conducted by Jake Luciani, that the best time to publish your blog posts is between 1pm and 3 pm (PST) and then between 5 pm and 7 pm (PST). And the best day is Thursday. Weekends are the worst days to post because very few people access blogs during weekends.

Jake used an RSS software API to study social bookmarking websites Digg, del.icio.us, Reddit and Mixx to arrive at this result. You can see the associated graphs on the Read/Write Web post.

Does it mean you shouldn’t post regularly? I don’t think so. Although such data helps you target certain audience, I think any time is good to post provided your post is relevant and useful. Social bookmarking websites are not good indicators of traffic trends (in the real sense) because the dynamics are totally different. Most of the time it’s the herd mentality that causes traffic surges through these websites. Real traffic, valuable traffic, is gradually built, one post at a time. I’m not saying that traffic from social bookmarking websites doesn’t matter, but you shouldn’t judge your blogging success by the amount of exposure you get from these websites.

Provided your blog content is relevant and useful, your readers will go through it as soon as they get a chance, and that can be any day, at any time.