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In case you are not aware, one of the most daunting tasks of starting a new website is preparing website content itself. Most often, web design companies are not in a position to help you with content. The apparent reason is that, you are the one who understand your business better. Here, I will provide some tips to help you get started.
Determine Navigation buttons and Standard pages
Normally for a small site with 5 pages, the navigation buttons will be standard. These websites are suitable for new startup or small businesses, with limited information to display online. Below are some common button names to display vital information for your site visitors:
a) Home [Always advisable to link to the homepage from every other page]
b) Products / Services
c) About us
d) Contact
e) The last page can be about "Testimonials / Promotion / Our clients / News etc"
Normally for the homepage, you may display some latest product photos if your company is dealing with products instead of services. If your business provides services, then you may consider displaying some portfolio. It is always good to have a short line of intro about the company too, and what the website is all about. This also helps search engines and web directory editors to classify your website better.
For the contact us page, it will be good to have a contact form, with spam control features. This helps to capture enquiries that will go to your email address. We do not recommend that you display a visible email address online as there are many robots that may collect these email addresses and send you spam emails later.
For the product / service page, normally we will have some product pictures with descriptions. You may decide whether or not to include shopping cart or payment gateway features onto the website or simply a product order form.
Legal information
For eCommerce websites or web portals, we recommend that you include some legal information such as "Terms of use/service", "Privacy notice" and "Return policy" etc.
Such information is important when your site visitors purchase products online or sign up as a member. By displaying such information, you are giving some basic assurance to your customers that you are operating a professional business. If you are constrained with budget and do not wish to hire a lawyer to write for you, I strongly suggest that you take a look at the pages from your competitors. While I do not believe you should copy their content directly, it is always good to have some reference so that you have a much better idea on what to write.
Search engine optimization (SEO) friendly content
When it comes to optimizing your site for search visibility, any experienced internet marketing gurus will know: "Content is King". Search engines always strive to deliver good quality content for their visitors. This is their product. If you can provide good content for them, they will be happy and give higher ranking for your site.
Here are some guidelines on how you should prepare your content for higher search visibility:
a) Always include some key phrases eg. "Web Design Company" in your content. However, we have to emphasize that you should avoid stuffing too much of these keywords deliberately. Keyword stuffing may result in a penalty by search engines. Your site ranking may drop drastically.
b) Important keywords should appear at the top of the page. This makes perfect sense as the 1st 2 paragraphs are normally the most important information that you would want to display to site visitors.
c) Write content that is useful, so that your visitors come back. If your visitors come back to visit your site again, search engines will know.
d) Content on homepage should be reasonably long. Normally, we suggest that your homepage contains at least 3 paragraphs and 10 sentences.
Protecting your content
After painfully preparing the write up and everything, you need to be careful if you are asking a vendor to design or develop your site. Potentially, your web design company may claim ownership of the whole completed website if you do not have a formal written agreement with them. So, we advise you to ask for an official quotation when you are working on a new site.
To prevent your competitors from stealing the content that you have prepared, you may indicate at the bottom [eg. Copyright © 2001- 2007]. 2001 is the year when the site is first published. Also, you may visit copyscape.com to search for pages with similar content as yours. This helps to identify any infringements by others.
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