Content is King – The Expert Eye Companion Post, Episode 1

Why bother creating a website if you’re not going to use it to give people what they want? In the first episode of The Expert Eye, Karl and I talked about how “content is king” on a website, and brought up two best practices:

• Give them what they want
• Eliminate the fluff

Give them what they want

For the most part, people coming to your website are going to have a specific intent – they’re going to be looking for something in particular, whether it’s information, products, or phone numbers. This means that they’ll be looking for “information scent”, stuff that matches what they’re looking for. And since the Internet is such an easy place to find information, if you can’t supply that scent in the first few seconds that someone is on your page, chances are they’re hitting the back button and going to find your competitor.

In the episode, we show one site that doesn’t really give me what I want right away – there’s too much other stuff that comes before it on the page, and much of the messaging isn’t really benefits-oriented. Karl mentions that most people looking for things on the Internet have some kind of “pain” – a problem that needs solving. The best way to help people out is to address those pains and tell me how I can benefit from working with you. Don’t just tell me that I can sign up for your newsletter, give me a good reason to do it.

Giving me what I want right away is important because the majority of the time, people won’t read your whole website (again, this is contingent on intent – if I’m looking to read a news article, I will read the whole thing). We see this in our eye tracking all the time, and Jakob Nielsen has a number of articles about it on his blog. In the eye tracking heatmaps below, the red areas show where people look the most, and areas without colour are where people don’t look at all – it’s pretty obvious that to get the most eyeballs looking at something, it generally has to be at the top of the page.

Heatmaps from a study by Jakob Nielsen showing what parts of the page are seen by most people (http://www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html)

Eliminate the fluff

Another pitfall that many websites out there suffer from is the marketing “fluff” – the “Welcome to the Company X website!”. You don’t need this. Most people don’t want to wade through it to find the content that’s actually useful to them, so just leave it out.

We mention a couple of books by Steve Krug – Don’t Make Me Think and Rocket Surgery Made Easy – as two books that should be in everyone’s library. Krug’s advice on writing content is to write it, cut it in half, and then cut it in half again, leaving you with 25% of what you originally had. Tough in practice, but it really makes you think about what you’re writing.

One of the examples we show in the episode forces me to read through a bunch of text about when the company was founded, where they’re located, how awesome their consultants are, and so on, before it really tells me what they can do for me. It’s ok to have this stuff on your website, but you have to convince me that you can help me first. Another site gets it right – the first line of their content is, “Looking for advanced energy training to help you master the energy market?” In that one sentence, they’ve addressed my pain (need advanced training) and told me the benefit (master the market), and they managed to do it without marketing fluff.

Please send us questions or suggestions for future episodes. You can do that by leaving a comment here, or you can email us. You can also follow us on Twitter, where we keep an eye on the exciting world of user experience and marketing.

See you next time!