Writing and organizing content for your website

When we think about the process of creating a website, what usually comes to mind is creating a visual design and developing the programming that supports the design. But easily the most important part of website creation is the development and organization of the website content itself– the very reason why anyone would want to be on your site in the first place!

Websites are not print brochures

The first thing we need to do is stop thinking about our site as a collection of “pages”. In a static HTML-only website, the content is the page, and the pages are all separate files linked together which is similar to print media. The dynamic, CMS website is different. Here the website content exists separately from the structure of the site; rather than pages we have code that pulls content from the database and displays it somewhere in a template. So on any given website “page” you could have content from here or there depending on your code. This gives us better freedom to develop content that can be re-used in various ways throughout the site.

Where do you start?

Writing website content can seem overwhelming. Unlike a book or brochure, there is not really a beginning, middle and end. What we need to do is find a simple entry point to get the process rolling. The first thing a content writer needs to know is what the basic site structure, or information architecture is. Defining a structure for your site will clarify what you need to write. But how do you create an information architecture for your site?

Information Architecture

I think a great place to start is with the website users. Who are they? What do they want? As an example, let’s define users for a fictional site which has some premium content people can subscribe to see:

• Anonymous users, potential customers
• Subscribers
• Content Editors
• Administrators

Now that we know who will be visiting our site, we can map out what they want to see:

Ok great, so now we know what kind of content needs to be presented to which users. And you might notice that after you categorize the kind of content the users want to see it is very easy to figure out what the subpages will be. But what do you put on the home page??? Well the home page is usually the starting point for all users, so there needs to be an entry point for everyone. Let’s list out the most important messages we want to send them:

Home page

Anonymous users

1. Who we are (intro paragraph with link to full info “About” page)
2. What we do (short paragraph, often called “Mission Statement” in CMS programs)
3. Our product (image and description or slideshow with benefits and testimonials, links to product pages)
4. GET THE PRODUCT (goes directly to shopping cart)

Subscribers

1. New premium content (Titles of new content, link to full article)
2. Upgrade deals (Small description of deal with link to full info)
3. Login

Content Editors, Administrators

1. Login

If it helps, you can put this into a table also:

The main thing that you are probably noticing is that absolutely none of the home page content “items” are standalone content– they all are basically pieces from other pages that are grabbed on the fly and presented to get the users involved in the site.

This of course is not limited to the home page; on subsequent pages you can introduce featured products in a sidebar that appears on all the General Information pages for the Anonymous users, and for the Subscribers you can prompt them to upgrade their subscription with teasers and deals in the sidebars of their content. What was once an overwhelming project that we didn’t know how to start is now something that is easy to visualize, and by looking at the charts as content writers we can tell what sort of thing to write for each page.

In sum

After going through this simple process, here’s what we now have:

• Basic Information Architecture
• Clear idea of who is reading what content
• Clear idea of what words should be on each page

Now the content writer can start writing, the designers can start working on the graphics and the developers can start building the skeleton of the site. Project moves forward. Hooray!