content and your web site
How do you determine what your website should contain?
Level of customisation of your products and services
The level of customisation of your services and products will help determine what should be done with website. The higher degree of customisation, the less general content your website can contain to appeal to a mass audience. Highly specialised services and products mean that your website should simply be an advertisement for what you can offer with illustrations (photographs and descriptions or case studies) of the types of services or products if desirable. Some highly specialised organisations need only maintain an internet “telephone directory site” where essential contact information is provided.
If your offerings are more generalised, you can introduce content specific to the entire set of those offerings. The question becomes what you want to provide about your offerings and how much of it already exists.
Type of Content to be offered
What content are you planning to share with the world?
Do you have existing content?
Many ambitious websites fail to solve the content problem. These organisations have a vision of what they want their website to be but fail to consider how or from whom the content will be produced to fill the website pages. Content may already exist for other purposes and may be repositioned for the web. Organisations frequently possess large volumes of content created for other purposes
In such cases, the job may be easier. However, content published for the web takes a different form from content published for printed media. Web content tends to be newspaper article like in form. Otherwise site visitors will become impatient. Therefore much existing content may have to be re-written for the website. In some cases, content may be placed on the web in pdf form. However, such use will still require the preparation of content to introduce it. In other cases, your site may introduce links to other sites if they are relevant but only if those sites are complementary and help your core mission. Such external sites should not be allowed to become the focus of the site visitor as the centre of your site should be your own organisation.