How To Write Great Website Content - Page 2

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.

Other items to consider are: Use small images that give the user the option to enlarge if they desire, don't use music or sounds that are automatically forced upon a visitor, do not use pop-up windows, never use blinking text, restrain yourself from using fancy features like Java applets, Flash Intros, javascript, excessive animation and other cool but unnecessary features that slow the access to your content. And NEVER use code on your site that is specific to a certain browser. Have you ever seen a site that says something like "Best viewed with Internet Explorer"?

5) Provide content that is broken up into short paragraphs and short pages. People are much more able to digest content faster if the information is given to them in short bursts instead of long clumps of text.

6) Do not use images to replace text. They take longer to load, they really don't look much better, blind people can't read it and that text will no longer be searchable by the search engines.

7) Only underline links and make sure you have actual links underlined if the link is included in a paragraph of text. If you underline text to emphasize something but it is not an actual link, your readers will almost certainly be confused. The same goes for links that are not underlined. People may miss out on valuable information because they have no idea that the text leads to something more detailed or interesting.

Article Author: Christopher Auman

Visit Christopher Auman's author page — Christopher Auman's Blog