Content is king they say. This has never been so true as it is when you are talking about web content. There is so much information available on the web these days that people expect information to be unique, timely and relevant. The content needs to be fast loading, clean and easy to read, easy to navigate and especially easy for the search engines to index.

This is the recipe for successful web content in a nutshell but getting from theory to reality is the part that most web sites miss. Going beyond the obvious — Good grammar, spelling and choosing a clean, clear typeface — there are many things that you can do to write quality content for your website. Here are a few to consider:

1) Make your content interesting. Don't just provide dry information and facts. Make it lively and entertaining whenever possible. Sell yourself, your services or your product. Use humor and make yourself likable. Put yourself into your clients shoes and try to write your content as if you were trying to convince yourself to buy, sign-up, or request your own service. What would make you buy your product?

2) Write about things and provide information that you know well. Do it quickly and efficiently so you get your message across fast but also make quality use of the time someone is spending reading your site. If you try to cover a large topic in a mediocre or unconvincing way, people will probably not bookmark and return or even worse they many not even finish reading and move on.

3) Keep your content short and sweet when possible. The first paragraph of your article is critical. If it's dull, boring and lifeless, your reader will surely move on. You must keep their interest right from the start and drive them to pick up the phone or pull out their credit card. On the web people like to get information fast and it better be good. Don't drone on for pages trying to sell and convince people. Give it to them straight and to the point and then if you feel that it might be beneficial to expand on your topic then do so. But never drag out a sales pitch. Allow your visitors to get the information they need and then if they want more you can always provide it.

4) Make your content load fast. There is nothing more irritating than a site that loads slow. There are many reasons for this and the reasons can sometimes be out of your hands like the users connection speed, network congestion, slow host server, etc. But overall you and your web developer have control over your content.

First off, the way your web developer codes and programs your page is very important. At 168 we always try to code our pages so they use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards. To the non-literate web person this means two things. First, CSS allows you to accomplish more with less and reduce the amount of code on your pages. The less code, the smaller the page size. Second, CSS is the accepted standard in web design as compared to visual mark-up HTML tags that will soon be deprecated and eventually will no longer work.