The Best Time To Create Content

The best time to create content is before you begin building your website.

Most site owners and web design studios get this equation backwards, and focus on visual elements and logos first. While a professional logo is important to have, a site without great content is not useful to anyone.

Having content prepared for your website shows that these questions have been answered or at least considered:

  • Who is your target audience?
  • What problem are you solving for them?
  • How does your product solve that problem?

An Analogy

Your website is the container for your message. Aligning the design with the content makes that message and your website more effective. Misalignment of the content and the design may confuse customers, and the effectiveness of the message can be greatly diminished. This is one reason design follows content.

Imagine your website is a vehicle, and your content is the driver. What would misaligned design look like?

  • If the driver spoke about environmental issues or green energy, they wouldn’t drive a gas-guzzling Hummer! They might drive a Prius instead.
  • If the driver was targeting the wealth accumulation crowd, they would not drive a Neon or a Focus, but they would drive a Lamborghini or a Bentley.
  • If the driver was talking to ranch owners, they wouldn’t drive a Escalade, but they would drive something rugged, like a Dodge Ram.

Mismatched Content and Design

This analogy illustrates why the design process is more focused when the content has already been produced. But there are other reasons as well.

Testing For Real World Use

Websites that are designed without real content often rely on lorem ipsum text, Latin text that serves as a placeholder. Stand-in content is often optimized for best case scenarios, where headlines, paragraphs, and images are the perfect size. Real content is often nothing like that.

Having real content allows the web designer to make adjustments if the headlines are especially long, or posts are extremely short. Preparing for scenarios such as these may not occur to your web designer if they are using perfectly sized placeholder content.

Knowing how you will produce content also helps your web designer plan for those conditions. Will you be embedding videos, images, or widgets from third party sites? Do you usually write new pages in Microsoft Word first? If you are formatting fonts and brand colors in Word first, cutting and pasting into the WordPress visual editor can sometimes cause glitches in your layout. Microsoft Word adds tons of unwanted formatting code — so knowing this ahead of time can be useful.

Good Content Takes Time and Effort

Every website has a purpose, usually it is to get people to take some sort of action. If you want customers to buy something, you must convince them that your product is right for them. How do you convince them that what you offer is superior to your competitors?

If you already have an army of customers who recommend you to their friends, then that will help a great deal. But if you are looking to convince people who haven’t heard of your product yet, the content on your website needs to deliver the goods.

Great content will take more time and effort than you anticipate. It is not something you should plan on cranking out the week before your site launch. When the content is rushed, less thought and concern is put into it. Branding, design, and content are all important, but if you only choose one thing to devote your efforts to, make sure it is site content.

Customers who hear of you will invariably head to your site. If the design is beautiful, but there is no compelling story that convinces them to make a purchase, will they still make the effort to give your product a shot?

Give yourself time to collect the content you already have and produce new content. This extra effort is what will help separate you from your competitors online.

We Are Experiencing Delays

When content is the last thing to be produced for a website, bad things happen. Site launches get pushed back, budgets get blown, or the site is forced to launch with the content only half done. It’s bad times all around, yet another reason to work on content first.

Design Is The Sizzle, Content Is The Steak

Design is the supporting cast, your content is the starring role. They need each other to work well, but only one of them is the reason customers come to your website.

People do not go to art galleries to look at the frames, but to admire what those frames contain.

What If You Don’t Know What To Say?

If it is a struggle to find something to say with your website, perhaps a smaller site is a better first step. Websites are always evolving by nature. You can always start with something small and build the story of your business as it grows, and you learn more about what you want to say.

Writing or creating is not easy for most people. It takes practice like any other skill. If you are thinking about launching or revamping your website, start thinking about who you want to reach, what you want to say to them, and what you want them to do once they hear your message. The more laser-focused of a goal you have in mind, the more effective your content will be.

Why You Should Own Your Content Platform

There are a lot of free tools that allow you to build an online presence for your business.

Facebook, Yelp, and Google Business Profile are all examples of satellite extensions of your business.

While these are great ways for customers to find you, they fall woefully short when used as your main online business hub.

These free platforms make you conform to their rules about what type of content you can publish, how they use your content, or how visible you are to potential customers.

These platforms are not meant to be replacements for a central website, but are meant to enhance and point people towards your website. The only way to maintain control over the material you publish is to own your content platform.

Yes, a Facebook Page is better than nothing at all. But unless someone is searching for your business by name, it’s going largely unseen. As of March 2014, the organic reach of Facebook Pages is dropping like a stone in the sea each month, and the top 200 brands on Facebook report a measly 0.45% fan engaement.

Every social media platform needs to make money eventually, and the easiest way to do this is through advertising. Their trick is to grow huge, become ubiquitous, and then use that large user base in whatever manner they see fit. Many social media platforms state in their Terms of Service that anything you post is their content, not yours. This is also true for other publishing platforms like Medium and Quora. If a social network owns all the content published there, it means they can do whatever they want with that material, including showing ads with your face in them or using your photos in ads.

These platforms all serve a purpose, and can help your business gain additional exposure, but it is not optimal to make them the main platform for dispensing your posts, photos, and business information. You cannot control the customer experience or how your material will be used, so these are better utilized as secondary outposts for your brand. These entities can be effective satellites that point traffic back to your website, the hub of your online presence.

Your website is the one platform that you own free and clear, where anything you publish is your copyrighted property. While it is unlikely that Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram will fold anytime soon, they still own whatever you publish there.

What happens if they decide one day to hide your posts from your followers? (Oh yeah, Facebook already did that.)Not much you can do about it; it’s their platform.

Owning your content and publishing on your own website means your business becomes more visible. Google is more likely to surface something from your site than from your Facebook or Twitter feeds. I’m not advocating that you abandon social media, but realize what it is and what it is not.

Social media is great for building community and adding layers of definition to your brand. Social media is not is a reliable, unchanging place to point people to when they need important information about your business. That’s what your website is for.

What platforms are you using to build your brand? Is your website the mothership for your business or is it roughly the same level as your Facebook Page? Let me know how you are using different platforms to build your brand.

Managing Images in WordPress

Managing images in WordPress is done through the Media Library in the back-end.

There are things you can do to make it easier and more efficient.

Uploading and finding the images you need for a particular string of posts can be difficult if you are hunting through a series of photos that look similar.

Making the sorting process less unwieldy is what this advice focuses on.

Launching a new website or duplicating an existing site requires matching images to pages. The first instinct for many folks is to gather the images in one folder and use the Media Uploader to upload all the images at once. You may prefer to chunk the images into groups of a hundred or less, and match images to posts systematically.

The Media Library in WordPress shows images in reverse chronological order. If the images have been bulk uploaded, these are also shown in reverse alphabetical order.

Two things that make image sorting cumbersome are uploading images that are not needed and not making the images sortable before upload.

Rename your files before you upload them! Name them after the post or page they are going with, and make them searchable. This seems obvious, especially after searching for an image by name, only to discover it is called IMG3627.jpg or something similar. The Media Library will automatically populate the title tag with the file name. You may also like to make the title and alt tags something human readable when I add an image to a page.

WordPress Media Gallery

Uploading images that will not be used or too many images at once makes them harder to sort. I find it easier to work through sections of a site, especially if the new site is large. I divide the images into folders that correspond to sections before uploading, and move through systematically, sorting by name. On sites that are thousands of pages deep, working in clusters is a necessity.

Managing images after a site launch works similarly. Decide what images you will use before uploading, and upload only what you need. If there are images you are not using in the Media Library, you may want periodically delete those to save disk space. It is a good practice to name your images after the corresponding page, both for SEO and sorting purposes.

Featured Images

The Media Library screen will show available images, the date they were uploaded, and whether they are attached to a post. You can adjust the Screen Options at the top of the page to show more or less information. An image is considered attached if it is set as a Featured Image. In WordPress, Posts or Custom Post Types can have a Featured Image. Most themes use Featured Images in one fashion or another, usually as a thumbnail when showing a list of Posts, as in blog archives or a list of products in an e-commerce website.

Managing Images in WordPress

(Image) Size Matters

Using the appropriate size photo for a specific task is vital for page speed and performance. Images used for full page backgrounds or full width slideshows need to be large, so that they do not look distorted or pixelated. Photos that are used for blog images usually don’t need to be larger than the space they will occupy on the screen. (An exception might be for photography galleries). The iPhone takes large resolution photos, and a regular camera even larger resolution pictures. If you are uploading images that are 2000×1600 pixels, but they will be displayed at a much smaller size, that creates unnecessary weight for the page to download.

An effective way of optimizing images is to create a copy of the original photo, and use Photoshop to scale it down to the largest size the page will require. This will save precious seconds of download time, improving user experience and your website’s SEO.