Creating and maintaining content

Content is the information that your website presents. The clarity and usefulness of the content on your website is vitally important. Unclear, poorly written or badly presented content is likely to frustrate visitors, undermine your credibility and discourage return traffic.

There are two fundamental questions you should address with respect to any content to go on your website:

• Is the content relevant and interesting to your intended audience?
• How is that content best presented to most effectively communicate your intended messages to your target audience?

Maintaining useful and relevant content is important to your business or organisation because good cross-linking across your website can assist with search engine optimisation. You should also consider what information visitors to your site will expect to see, and develop content that is consistent with their expectations.

Take care to ensure your content is:

• accurate
• current
• compliant with relevant laws
• either your own (your organisation’s) intellectual property, or you have the permission of the owner(s) of other intellectual property. See the legal issues section.

You can present content in a number of ways, including:

• simple text, such as on this page (see text content)
• static images, such as photos or other image files (see still image content)
• multimedia content, which combines video or animated content with an audio soundtrack (see animated and multimedia content)
• interactive content that includes social media elements.

You should also consider the importance of effective use of hyperlinks in presenting your content in a logical sequence.

Maintaining content

Just as important as creating good content in the first place is ensuring that the content is kept current, relevant and interesting for your target audience. New, fresh and interesting content encourages visitors to keep returning to your site.

The more relevant the content that people find on your site, the more likely they are to link to it and the higher your site is likely to rank in search results. This will help to attract more visitors to your site.

Keeping content regularly updated requires a continual (or at least periodic) investment of time in your website. In most cases, simply building a website then forgetting about it is a wasted investment.

To maintain your content, it is often good to have multiple people involved. Each can  contribute a small amount of time and information, resulting in a cumulative benefit.

Another way to generate continually updated content is to offer your visitors the ability to contribute to your site—to deploy social media. See the section on interactive content for more about social media.

Things to consider

When developing your website, plan how your team members with the responsibility for updating the content will access it.

This is a particular issue if your website was developed with the content coded directly into the HTML programming (see building a website). In that case,  could mean that anyone you ask to contribute to the content will need the ability to program in HTML or else will need to ask someone with that capability to make the updates for them. It also presents the risk that people contributing to or updating your content can (accidentally or otherwise) modify the HTML code and change important aspects of your website.

A web content management system (WCMS) can help you avoid this problem.