Building Content For Your Site The Right Way
You might find building a content rich web site intimidating. So many things to do. A million in one directions to go at once.
It sure would make things easier if could be done one small piece at a time... Its not only possible to do this, it is smart to do. Just a piece at a time. An hour here, 15 minutes there. Before you know it, an impressive and profitable site emerges. The secret? Build it up in small manageable chunks. Blueprint For A Manageable Site
Just because you could build a house without a blue print, it doesn't mean it would be smart to do. The same goes for a web site. By knowing ahead of time what foundation to build your site on, you can plan ahead and make sure all of the pieces fit. You can also get a reasonable structure in place as you take time filling up the rooms (or web pages) with useful content. You have seen sites that don't plan ahead.
They are the ones with "under construction" or "coming soon!" plastered all over the place. This is the equivelant of visiting a house where the roof is missing and only 2 walls are in place. Not a pleasant place to visit or stick around.
First Things First
Using the house analogy again, the first things in place are the foundation, frame and roof. Without those, the house wouldn't stand. Your web site is going to have equivelant features that are necessary to have in place before it goes live. The main page, contact page, "about us" page perhaps... You decide what the absolute "essentials are" Focus on getting those pages in place first so you can go live as soon as practical. Big Benefit Of Building Content Rich Pages
One excellent benefit of building up your web sites content page by page is that you are more likely to focus each page on a specific topic. This is a good thing. A very good thing. A search engine such as google is much more likely to rank your page higher when the content is as focused on one particular topic as possible. If you have a million and one topics, google will react just as most visitors to your page will react. It will wonder what the heck the page topic is about and quickly move on. A good thing to remember is that if your visitors like a page because it is focused on a topic, google will like it also.
Plan For Expansion
One fantastic way to plan for expansion is by using the "template page" feature that some HTML editors such as Dreamweaver have to offer. This is how it works:
- You create one web page that is pretty close to the standard look that you want for all of your pages
- You tell the program that only certain parts of the page can normally be edited. (That is where your content goes).
- All of your future pages are based on this template page. You start off with a standardized look and then save the page as an individual page as you work on them and fill them with content.
Now here's the beauty of using templates. Because these pages are associated with this template page, you can control the look of ALL of your pages from one central spot. For example, if you wanted to add a link to the navigation menu on your site you do so on the main template file. It will ask if you want to apply this change throughout every web page that is based on that template. Without this feature, you would have to manually go through every single page on the site making the changes. Believe me, I have had to do it both ways in the past and can tell you first hand using a template is much more preferable!
Getting Organized You don't want every page on your web site linked from your home page. It would be a navigation headache. Instead create "departments" which organize the topics on your page. If you look at this site for example, you will see that I have departments such as "Time and Money Saving Tips" and "Ebook and Product Reviews". This keeps things much more organized and not so overwhelming. When you are building a content rich site, you may want to work on a department or two at a time to build it up with content. Instead of spreading yourself too thin, you can fill one and then move on to the next. You can always go back of course and add more but your site will expand with content gracefully instead of having empty departments. Make sure that the pages that are related link to each other in your site. This is called creating "spyder food" for the search engine spyders. They will basically come crawling along, find one link, follow it, find another link follow that... meanwhile indexing the pages for the search engine.
Setting Goals Be realistic about your site. Set goals. You can put up a postit note on your computer with a reminder such as "2 content rich pages a day". Before you know it, you will have substantial content in place. As you are building this content, always be thinking "If I was a visitor to this site, what topic of interest would I want to read about?". You then build a content rich page around that. When taken a step at a time, what once might have appeared to be an intimidating task is actually quite manageable. By knowing the right things to focus on will make not only your visitors but also the search engines happy with your efforts.
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