GLUTTONY – just stuff the content in without thinking

We’ve all been there. You know this “content stuff” is important and you know you need a lot of it so you grab big chunks of it and throw it all on the plate.

But the best websites are like a balanced meal, not a bargain bucket from Alabama Fired Chicken. The secret to content success is realising that text, video and pictures are ingredients that need to be blended together to produce pleasing combinations tailored for different palates.

Your editorial processes will ultimately determine how successful your site is by the creation of quality content that markets itself and your organisation. The responsibility for site content often falls on the shoulders of a few individuals in the marketing/web team. They are regularly provided content from different business units in a format and using language that is completely undigestable for an online audience. However, what can happen is that faced by the needs of the business the pressure is on them just to get the content up there.

This can so easily become the norm and you end up shoveling content on the site without really thinking about it. The site ends up bloated and unwieldy until it struggles to handle that waifer thin piece of content that will appeal to a vital demographic.

Because content can be fed so easily into a site, the false impression it gives is that it doesn’t require the same thought as offline corporate communications. But the content you publish online is part of your marketing mix. This is why you need to have the user experience at the heart of your editorial process . The usability of your content and how people are going to find it through search engines are key to you not losing control of the growth of your site.