Preparing Your site's Contents

With the goals of the site established, it's time to think of the most important issue the content.

Design and content have equal importance in regards to websites but if you must choose which one is immediately important, which will you choose, design or content?

Design will capture your visitor’s immediate attention. All the wows, oohhhsss and overwhelming appreciation of the design will follow it but after that what? visual site will be visted once or twice by a user to the contrary content designed sites will be visited agian and again for the helpfull satsfying information it offers.A website with good and well thought out content can and will survive longer than an extravagantly designed one.

Content is king! Content makes the big bucks..

To start any real discussion of content you have to know the audience. How old they are, where they work, what they earn, where they live, what they want to accomplish, their hobbies, their dreams, what are they looking for?.
Are you trying to inform or teach? Persuade? Sell? A combination of these three?
It's important to align your content goals with your company's goals.

Once you understand who your audience is, you've taken the first step toward creating content that is appropriate for them. You will also need to take into account what is appropriate for your company to publish.

Now make a list of all the content you want to make available on the site (newsfeeds, feedback, downloadable files, bulletin boards, static pages, whatever) and work out how you intend to get it to the user.

Web readers don't read-they skim, most of them are after specific information or are trying to complete a task. Always look for the simplest, most flexible solution.

The following actions will help make your contents clearer and shorter:

	Use lots of subheadings. It not only breaks up your text into chunks, it helps people decide where to "jump in." Sometimes users can tell an entire story just by skimming the subheadings
	Keep sentences and paragraphs short. Sentences should be no longer than 25-40 words. Keep paragraphs down to one idea.
	Use bullet and numbered lists. Not only do they break up the page a little, but they cause the eye to jump right to the list. Use a bulleted list when the order of the items doesn't matter. Use a numbered list for a procedure or when the order does matter.
	Use as many illustrations as you can. For products, include beauty shots and screen shots. Use a fever chart (also known as a line graph). To show a process or procedure, use a flowchart. Visuals like this convey lots of information in a compact form.
	Bold or italicize keywords. This will make your important points stand out. Don't use underlining, though, as that has come to signify hyperlinks.
	Shorten your line length. The longer your line length is, the harder it is for the human eye to track it, and therefore the harder it is for the mind to comprehend the words. Keep your lines down to 40 to 70 characters in length.
	Use fonts that were designed for online reading, such as Verdana (a sans serif) and Georgia (a serif). Be sure to choose readable font size.
	Links can help in skimming, too.