This is the second in series post on essential of a website. We have learnt several lessons while creating ours and are sharing it here. Do read our first post.

1.  Content of your website

Having got your sitemap in place, the next step is to pen down content for all your pages. In terms of time, we would place this as the most time consuming activity. It is essential that one person or a particular set of people only write the content as the tone and manner has to be consistent.

The language of the content has to be in line with the subject matter. After you have finished writing everything, keep it aside for 2 days before re-reading it again. Get it read by a third person neutral to your business to check if he or she is able to understand it completely.

It is a good idea to keep the text in simple language in small paragraphs. Not many people like to read long scrolls on what you do for a living.

2.  Add visuals or videos

Content is not restricted by text alone. It is good idea to include pictures, photos, caricatures, videos etc to make the site more appealing and compelling. People prefer reading photo essays to long texts. With broadband, it is possible to insert videos – however, do not make them heavy or too long.

3.  Landing Page

The reason why we are keeping this as a separate bullet point is because it is first page that the visitor sees. Chances are that most of them will leave from here itself if the page is not optimally designed. Ensure that you have not loaded a heavy file, mostly a flash, to load. Besides your close friends and family, nobody waits for it to load. They will leave thereby increasing your bounce rate

A lot of people prefer having their entire front page as a flash. While this may look good as flash allows basic animation, your site will lose out from being SEO-ed. Search Engine crawlers don’t consider flash while crawling thereby completely missing your front page unless you do deep linking to the site. As a result, the chance of your webpage appearing in the search engine reduces dramatically.

It is not a bad idea to come straight to the point. If yours is a business site, then people have reached there with a specific objective. Make sure that your services section is easy to locate on the landing page. We personally believe that simplicity is in. Trying to put down everything your company does on the main page only puts off people.

4.  Legal clearances & Copyrights:

Needless to say but all the text that you put up on your website should be clearly legally especially if you have put up claims for your product or service. Any text put up on the website is treated as official information coming from the company. Hence it is important that all data has been verified.

At the same time, if you are putting up anything of yours that is trademarked or patented, ensure that you mention it. Also all content can be copyrighted so that no one can lift anything from your site without permission. You can view a sample of a copyright

Continue to third post with this series of blog posts on essential of our website. Do read our previous post here

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Tags: content, copyrights, Essential, landing page

This entry was posted on Monday, October 20th, 2008 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Essential Series, Website 1.0 & 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.