When designing your new website, thinking of what pages to include is one thing. But writing the words to put on the pages is another matter. There is no need to be too formal, written content on the web is generally much more relaxed.
People don’t read a web site from start to finish like you would a book. So it is ok to reconfirm some information throughout the site. People may be entering the site several pages in and will have not seen the key facts covered on the Home page.
Keep the textual content on your main pages nice and short but make sure you include keywords. Have additional support pages with more in depth information for those people who really do like to spend a lot of time researching on the web. But people who have something to achieve, will want to get to the facts and find out what they need. These extra support pages can also be useful for search engine optimisation.
Use of bullet point lists to emphasise the main points on each page are a very useful way for people to quickly asses what each page is all about and decide whether to read it in more detail.
The Home page is the most common place for visitors to enter your site. Therefore it should sum up everything you do as quickly as possible and give information of what you have to offer. Your aim is to reassure people they are in the right place. Then allow them to easily identify how to find out more information that interested them. It is also the first page that will be read by search engines so important keywords should be included here.
Each Content page should have a heading at the top of the page that identifies exactly what the page is about. Each page should where applicable have a summary introduction which may only need to be one paragraph long but that sums up what the page is all about. This allows visitors to quickly decide if they want to carry on and read the rest of the page in more detail.
The rest of the information on the page should be broken down into short parts. With a heading for each one, this will aid visitors in scanning the pages and quickly pick out the parts of the pages that are interested in
Remember! To use additional support pages for the more in depth information for those people who really do like to spend a lot of time researching on the web.
There are some key things to remember when writing the content for your website. Think about what visitors are looking for and what are the most important points that you want users to read. Go back in time before you owned your property and were looking for a vacation home, what did you look for? What caught your interest? Making a list of all the plus points of your property the content of each of your rooms. Look at other sites at how other owners have written their content.
Once you have written your content, get someone else to read it. Ask for feedback, such as; if it made sense and if there were any questions they felt were unanswered. You can then go back and plug the gaps or remove things that are not required.