Webforumz Newsletter - February 2008

Articles

Want your website to speak to your niche?

Get the web content to work together with the design to meet your goals.

These days, you can’t just throw up any generic selling site and expect a vault of cash to land in your lap. When creating a website, you want the entire site, design and copy, to speak to a specific target audience in a specific sort of way. At the same time, you want to be found and indexed so you show up in organic searches.

Your goal is to create a balance that includes a choreographed arrangement of copy and visuals to make web pages more attractive and target market friendly. This is the key to creating a website as an effective sales and marketing tool.

Presentation of content is the key to readability and conversions.

A cleaner, neater design makes any product, service or organization look more credible while the content validates that point. But good content is only good if visitors can find what they’re looking for and they’re able to read it. A first-rate web page presentation includes (examples are at the bottom of this article):

  • Navigation that makes sense
  • Breaking up the copy in bite-sized chunks with paragraphs, subheads or bold sentences that punctuate a subject
  • Setting off and using bullet points to highlight key product benefits
  • Using a font that is a size people can see
  • Captioning  a photo to break up the copy which adds visual interest and highlights a benefit
  • Open up the leading (space between the lines) so it’s not so squishy it resembles an “endless sea of type”
  • Reasonable use of reversed out type (white on black) since too much can be hard on the eyes.
  • Some air in the design to allow you to create focal points. (Resist the urge to fill every nook and cranny with something.)

Where are the web page hot spots?

Visually, from the standpoint of most visitors, your web page hot spot is the top left hand corner like you see in the diagram.

From the standpoint of the search engines, the page hot spot is what shows up in the first few lines of that seo text browser (http://www.seo-browser.com/).

We all know that the words and phrases closest to the top are the most important as are hyperlinks and headings (i.e. <h1></h2> tags).

In looking at your web page in design mode, the words or sentences that are at the top of your layout might not be the first ones in that text browser. That’s why it’s important to check and see. I’ve had layouts where the right hand column was the first thing that showed up in a text browser--making that the key area for keywords and search engine optimization.

And while it’s also true that hyperlinked phrases are great for SEO, sprinkling links randomly about in the body copy is a recipe for update disaster. It’s also an annoying interruption to those reading the content.  So setting a place for links in a sidebar or isolating them together in a designated place like a box, achieves all goals—easier page upkeep, search optimization and the more organized navigation that visitors like.

Finding the balance between search engine optimization and visitor interest means you don’t sacrifice a killer headline or tag line to plug in a keyword. Conversely, you don’t act like a designer or copywriter snob and ignore the importance of incorporating keywords in key places.  

Those are just some of the tips on getting your copy and design to work well together to inspire visitors to stay, buy, click, join, return or recommend you. Now all you have to do is get them to your website. :)

Copy Treatment Examples:

Bullet Points highlight key benefits:
bullet points

Leading that is is too squishy is hard to read.
leading

vs.

Leading that is more open is more reader friendly
leading

You can open up the leading in the .css stylesheet or style tags with  
p { line-height: 2.0em }