When it comes to building your ideal website, the content is just as important as the layout. You have to be able to present your content thoroughly so that your viewers have a clear idea of what your business brings to the table.
Organize Your Goals
If you have a potential client scrolling through your website, what are the emotions you want evoke when they visit your site? Think about what you hope to achieve by drawing people to your website.
It’s imperative that you can organize your information before adding content to your website. Doing so clearly demonstrates your ambitions for your business in terms of the past, present, and future. Make clear what you offer in concise language, using words and tone that reflect the brand or business. You don’t want people to have an opportunity to misinterpret what you mean or get lost as you present your content. Creating a rough outline of the key points before you begin writing forces you to focus on the important details and what you hope to accomplish when people consume your content. Knowing your professional goals for not only your website but also your business, makes creating content around those goals that much easier.
Tips & Tricks for Grabbing Attention
- Demonstrate contrast: the brain naturally picks up on items that have a before-and-after or a cause-and-effect aspect. Showcasing any transformation means change… and chances are, if you give them a reason to believe in this change, they’ll be open to your ideas.
- Inspire feeling: when experiencing emotion, a person automatically becomes attached to that specific person, place, or thing because they can remember the way it made them feel- which is what you want your business to be: remembered.
- Know what you’re offering: once you grasp this, present your information in a logical and practical way. If your information is scattered, unclear, and all over the place, your viewers will lose attention and fast.
- Be frank: keep in mind that at first, people likely won’t read; they will scan the content. Your goal is to make them want to go back and read through everything thoroughly which can be achieved with breaks in the text. This can come from strategic images, bold or italic typefaces, or lists, to name a few. If something catches the eye of the user, they are more likely to stick around and digest what you’re saying, so try not to overwhelm your viewers with paragraphs of information. Be frank and get to your main points and goals.
- Provide examples: remember that most people are visual learners. Having examples, whether that be infographics or just an example story to back up your information, gives an alternative way for people to absorb your business and your goals.
Final Thoughts
It’s true that the design of a website is the first thing that catches the eye of the user, but it is the content that will make them stay. Using targeted strategy to create a website that appeals to your ideal customer or target audience means taking a layered approach. Design is the first stage, which then becomes heavily supported by engaging content. When creating content that will be incorporated throughout your website, you need to know your service, what it offers, and how it benefits others, and you need to be able to say this all concisely. Taking this approach will successfully grab viewers’ attention and set your business in motion.