Writing Web Site Content

Critique for Website of IBM

2009-08-05T18:57:00.011-04:00

In the most of the web designers' thoughts, it's difficult to establish a fabulous web site. To assess whether a web site is good or bad, we often consider from the following strategy: purpose, information architecture, usability, design, quality, and the big picture.

IBM (International Business Machines Corporation) is a very popular company and it is a multinational computer technology and IT consulting corporation headquartered in United States. To know how good a web site should be for such a big company, we can start to look at its home page.

From my first impressions of IBM.COM, it tells me that the index of the IBM page, which includes all the supplies of IBM. However, without reading more about the page, if I am a person who does not have the knowledge of IBM, I will not know this web site is for a computer technology and IT consulting company.

1. Audience/Purpose
The primary audiences of the website is the people who wants to get help of computer technology or IT consultation, and the purpose of the site is to help the audiences to solve those problems. The audiences can find the technology they want to know and searching for the products. The website is trying to accomplish people to know how the products of IBM can help people get advantages of their IT life, and it enhances more people to use its products. It is an example of B2C (Business-to-Customer).

2. Information Architecture/Navigation
IBM’s website does a good job on the information architecture. The information of the whole page is organized very well. It sets the main navigation on the top of the page, and there are 6 categories in the navigation bar. The drop down menu help you get to where you want to go easily. In the middle of the page, there are some advertisements which advertise the ideas from IBM that can help you get a better life in IT field. Below the main navigation bar, they are the second level supplies which help you to learn more about the IT knowledge. At the bottom, they are extra help information. Overall, the architecture of this web site is findable and professional.

3.Usability
I have watched three of my friends used this site. Only one person could use the site flexible, and he was also the only one who is knowledgeable in IT technology. The other two took a little bit longer time to find the answers. As a result, the usability of a website is also depend on the different people, the knowledgeable IT people are always get easier to find what they want than the poor knowledge people in the website.

4. Construction and Design
The construction is complete and clear. It is a professional design. The pages are not luxuriance, but simple and explicit. The main color is deep blue and it makes the page looks comfortable. On the whole view, the design is appropriate for the target audiences.

5. Content Quality
The content in the site is brief and to the point. The content always lists the keywords first, and then the details. Moreover, the tone of the content is suited for the business.

6. The Big Picture
In conclusion, I think this is a good website because it does a good job on information architecture, construction, design and quality. For the usability, there may be too many information in the website, and it is a little bit difficult for the new users to find what they need. Instead, the words of the content are short, and they always point out the key ideas in a short word, so it helps to get back from lost.

Yahoo and Microsoft enter search partnership

2009-07-30T16:18:00.005-04:00

Microsoft's Bing search engine will power the Yahoo website and Yahoo will in turn become the advertising sales team for Microsoft's online offering.

Yahoo has been struggling to make profits in recent years.

But last year it rebuffed several takeover bids from Microsoft in an attempt to go it alone.

Web Content Mining

2009-07-29T12:41:00.000-04:00

The meaning of web content mining:

Web content mining is the process to discover useful information from text, image, audio or video data in the web. Web content mining sometimes is called web text mining, because the text content is the most widely researched area. The technologies that are normally used in web content mining are NLP (Natural language processing) and IR (Information retrieval).

If you are interest in the WEB CONTENT MINING, here is an article to help you learn more!
Or you want to go to Wikipedia to see what is Web Mining .

Finding Web Content Mining Software

Good Web Content - Interesting

2009-07-27T00:56:00.000-04:00

Types of interesting content can include: telling a story, a reflection about how I helped a customer, feedback about a service or product and reference material that I have found useful
Do not just provide dry information and facts on the page.
Use humor and make yourself likable.
Put yourself into your clients shoes and try write your content as if you were trying to convince yourself to buy.
add some appropriate pictures
updated regularly with information that your customers will find interesting

How to write effective web site headlines - Continue

2009-07-25T00:22:00.000-04:00

The different between headlines and contents is that a good headlines should keep it simple and direct, but contents should be detailed.

Use the active voice
A “capital” idea: The first word in the head should be capitalized as should all proper nouns, but do not capitalize every word.
To the left
Present tense: do not make the readers confuse!
Punctuation normal — mostly: Headline punctuation is normal with two significant exceptions: Use periods for abbreviations only, and use single quotes where you would use double quotes in a story.
No “a” or “and” or “the”? Avoid the use of the articles a, an and the unless they are needed for clarity.
Subject and verb, please: Don't write headlines in which nouns and verbs (other than “is” or “was”) are assumed. And don’t start a headline with a verb.

Examples:
Good Headlines: go to http://web.ku.edu/~edit/headgood.html
Problem Headlines: go to http://web.ku.edu/~edit/headproblem.html

Good Web Conent - Keywords & Phrases

2009-07-24T23:55:00.000-04:00

A good web content is not only compelling, but also searchable. When you writing the web content you should know what are the keyphrases you are going to target. Search Engine Spider depend on the keywords and keyword phrases to find your site, and if you have not targeted specificly for your site, it's different for search engine users to find.

Brainstorm for Keywords and Phrases

keyword tool

Digital Tracker Keyword Suggestion: Digital Tracker is absolutely invaluable.
Free Keyword Suggestion Tool:Displays how many times a certain keyword was searched for in a given month. Shows all related searches for the entered keyword.
Google Keyword Tool: "The Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaigns and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends."

All of above help you get a clear idea that what keywords and phrases you can use in you web site.

where to put keywords?

As you got the basic keyword research started, you should know where is the best place to put thoes words.

Title Tag: It's great to put the keywords in the title tag. The title tag consists of those words you see at the top of your browser window in the blue space, and it is what search engines grab for the title display in their search results
Headline: The headline give the users first sence if they look the pages quickly. It's also the key for users get the main idea of the page. So, the headline is a good place to put your keywords.
Content : This is the place you write the most amout of keywords, and the keywords support the main ideas of the content.

How to write effective web site headlines

2009-07-24T23:30:00.000-04:00

1.Let the users to believe they go to the right place

When the users are linking a page, they want the page in the right place they are looking for, and especially for the new visitors. Therefore, headlines give users the best answers. Matching the headline to the reader's expection is a powerful way to hold users attention, and to drive them to continue read the page.

2. Make the reader feel good and want to continue

Headlines not only to give the readers ideas of the content of the page, but also has to make a "sale". So, it should not just be attractive, also has to selling the readers on the benefits of reading the page, and promote them willing to read continued.

3. Appeal to the search engines

Writing good headlines is one of the most effective factors that help you web site appeal to the search engines. There is no reason not to write a "good" headline to enhance the possibility of search. Now, what's a "good: headline mean? It means your headlines should covering the most relevant and profitable keywords and phrases, and that are the key points to help you get "good" headlines.

4.Satisfy the needs of the company or organization

Sometimes the web site is for the readers, otherwise, the web site represent the company. If it is for company or organization, the headline need to be written in a commercial style. Also it should become a powerful advertisement. Make sure no errors in it!

AdWords investigation

2009-07-22T20:32:00.010-04:00

1. I went to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
2. I found the top 5 keywords/keywords phrases on my blog are: blog, website, search engine, web and free.

3. Yes, the keyword tool worked well. Most of the keywords/keyword phrases that were found by the tool were the most important words, which related to my blog headlines, topics and contents. The only surprise is the keyword of “free”. Actually, I did not realize that I used this words so many times in my blog.

6. The graph below shows CPC and the estimated clicks per day.
The average CPC is $1.88, and estimated clicks per day are 7-10 times

7. $1.88(Average CPC)* 5(Amount of Keywords) * 22(Times of Clicks Per month) = $206.8(Monthly Budget)

8.

If I set my maximum CPC to $1.5, the average CPC will decrease, so the lowering CPC will decrease my AdWords position.
9. I will use the most relevant keywords/keyword phrases which also have a high CPC, and a strong CTR will result in a higher position for my ad. I will set the monthly budget to $400, and there are maybe more than 500 people visit my web site per month.

AdWords

2009-07-20T00:05:00.000-04:00

AdWord is the Cost Per Click text advertising used by Google. Users use AdWord to put the keywords into their ads, and the ads will be located in the right top of the Google search result page in order to drive traffic.

CPC
The cost-per-click(CPC) is the amount you pay each time a user clicks on your ad. You cost-per-click(CPC) bid is one of the factors that effects the position of an ad on search and content page. A higher CPC bid help you improve your ad's position, but the ads are not ranked solely by their bid.

Maximum Cost-per-Click (Maximum CPC)

Your maximum cost-per-click (CPC) is the highest amount that you are willing to pay for a click on your ad.

Daily Budget
Your daily budget is the amount that you're willing to spend on a specific AdWords campaign each day.

What affect the ads' ranking?
The ranking is based on a combination of the matched keyword's CPC bid and Quality Score. Quality Score is determined by the keyword's clickthrough rate (CTR) on Google, relevance of ad text, historical keyword performance, landing page, and other relevancy factors.

If your ads have high position of ranking, it's easier for users to see your ads. Therefore, your ads will become helpful for increasing the website traffic.

learn more from the site:http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=70

Web Content Management System

2009-07-18T12:03:00.000-04:00

A web-content-management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A WCMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.

Native .NET Web Content Management

Look at the Reference

E-mail marketing

2009-07-15T21:56:00.000-04:00

E-mail marketing is a form of direct marketing which uses electronic mail as a means of communicating commercial or fundraising messages to an audience.

In its broadest sense, every e-mail sent to a potential or current customer could be considered e-mail marketing. However, the term is usually used to refer to:

sending e-mails with the purpose of enhancing the relationship of a merchant with its current or previous customers and to encourage customer loyalty and repeat business,

sending e-mails with the purpose of acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately,

adding advertisements to e-mails sent by other companies to their customers, and

sending e-mails over the Internet, as e-mail did and does exist outside the Internet (e.g., network e-mail and FIDO).

Successful Email Marketing - How It's Done

Joe from www.perfect-email-marketing.com discusses how businesses can use email marketing as a powerful method for boosting your online

Using Email Marketing to grow your businesses!

Another View On Web Content

2009-07-10T18:35:00.000-04:00

Here is a interesting article that talk about how important is the content for a web, and there are several ways to get the content better.

When a prospective client accesses your website the feature that he is most interested in is its content.

At Broadway, we present the relevant information about your business in a simple, understandable form coupled with aesthetic and pleasing designs.

The content of your website must be lucid, logically presented and capable of engaging a prospective customer’s interest. It is a portal through which you can clearly state your USPs the characteristic factors that make your products or services unique as compared to other players in the market.

If you are interesting in this article and looking for more details, you can go to the "CONTENT is KING".

Writing Headlines and Titles for the Web

2009-07-07T00:00:00.000-04:00

How to write a clever healines? http://www.clickz.com/1006271
How to write great titles and headlines? http://masternewmedia.org/2005/06/01/how_to_write_great_titles.htm
This headline is where the acition is. http://www.clickz.com/978451
Who needs headlines? http://www.alistapart.com/articles/whoneedsheadlines
Why headline writing fo web is important? http://www.dustindiaz.com/why-headline-writing-for-web-is-important/

Planning Web Site Content

2009-07-04T22:39:00.000-04:00

How successful your web site will be depending on how well you plan the site. Usually, the result of the plan is a detailed content plan. A good planning helps you focus on your goals to achieve a good web page design.

How to do a good plan? Following the steps:

Define the site's purpose

During the stage, you should think about the question below:
1.What is the mission of the organization or company?
2.How will the website support this mission?
3.What are the short-term goals for the website? The long-term goals?
4.What do you want customers to do on the site? How often you want them to visit, how long do you want them to stay?
5.How will site success be measured?

Your site purpose can be expressed in a mission statement. Here an example:
The purpose of our website is to attract new customer with compelling content and strengthen the loyalty of existing customers by providing 24/7 support.

Define who is your audience

You may have several target audience. For each, you should know the members
1. age
2. education
3. language
4. Subject-specific knowledge and attitudes
5. Technical expertise
6. Computer equipment
7. Conditions of use
8. Disabilities
9. Income

Why is this information important? Younger audiences may expect hipper language and flashier graphics. Older visitors may prefer a businesslike tone and larger fonts. (Compare http://www.coolmath4kids.com/ and http://www.coolmath4teachers.com/.) People new to a topic might appreciate a glossary and FAQ. More experienced visitors would find a powerful Search engine more useful. That are all the possibility may happen on our audience. If we choose the wrong target of audience, we will lose a lot of visitors.

Start a content plan
This is a record of all the decisions you make during the planning stage, along with an inventory of the content your site will contain.
1. site purpose
2. taget audiences
3. content inventory (List each piece of content to include, along with a description, priority, and audience)
4. Information hierarchy. (This diagram shows the major content categories and their relationship to one another)
5. User scenarios. (Create a narrative that shows how a typical member of your target audience would use the content)

Using the content to defeat the competition

2009-06-30T19:21:00.000-04:00

If you want your web site to be better than the competition, you have to put a lot of hard working into it. Also, you should know some writing strategies to get you there. Here are some clever points you are looking for:

The bottom line is good content sells and a good web copywriter is worth their weight in gold
Website content should focus on the individual - a straight shot to what the user needs
Adhere to clear goals from the start

How do you achieve the strategies above? The answers can be found in this article.

Building a Findable Blog - Making Your WordPress Blog More Findable

2009-06-18T09:50:00.025-04:00

Define Update Service

To let the users find your site directly, your first modification to WordPress will be to extend the number of update services that are pinged when you publish new content.Examples of service are Technorati (http://technorati.com/) and Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/)

Another update service option is to use FeedBurner (http://feedburner.com/) to publish your RSS feeds. FeedBurner is a service that transforms RSS feeds into new content formats and provides enhancements like quick subscribe buttoms, podcast support, and advertising that can generate revenue for your site. Also, Feedburner helps you publicize your new content with PingShot (http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/pingshot).

Remapping Your Permalink URLS

The default URL structure for WordPress permalinks looks like something like this: http:example.com/?p=23 It is not very search engine friendly.

Few options to change it.

One of the way is to Chang the query string to "Date and name based". It will look like this: http:example.com/2009/06/17/post-title/ It is more search engine friendly.

Other way is to create a custom URL structure by selecting the last option,labeled"Custom, specify below"

Using Categories To Archive by Topic

WordPress lets you display your posts in the typical categories. It's not only help you to organize the site, but also better suits users' search behaviours.

Summarizing Posts To Direct Traffic Better, Displaying Your Most Popular and Recent Posts

See the details from the post of June 13.

Encourage Social Exchange of Your Content

You can encourage your users to bookmark your site or digg it using WordPress plugin created by Peter Harkins called Sociable( http://push.cx/sociable). Sociable always add some links under each post to some of the most popular social networking sites on the web.

Tagging Your Posts

A tag is a keywords that serves as data used to describe blog posts or other content on a website. A tag cloud is simply a collection of all tag throughout a site.It helps the readers to overview the type of contents your blog contains.

Building a Findable Blog - Working With WordPress

2009-06-18T01:29:00.006-04:00

WordPress is one of the most widely used blogging platforms. Its popularity stems from its great features, quick setup, ease of use, and massive community support.
It is pretty alluring from its findablity persoective. There are some features in Wordpress Installation that improve the findability.

Search
Search engine friendly URLs
Custom 404 error pages
RSS publication of blo posts, comments, and categories

Create Your Own Themes

Create your own theme is better than use the preinstalled themes. The advantage from creating your own theme is that you can optimiz your code for search engines, and create your special style, content and structure.

Content Development (web)

2009-06-14T00:19:00.002-04:00

A common pitfall of people who are new to web development is to underestimate the time and care required in preparing, or developing, content for a web site. So What is content development? It's a bigger job than most people realise. One major task is to work out what sort of content you will need to have on your site, or Scoping the content. Once you've worked that out, an even more important step is to decide how this content is supposed to be linked together. This is known as developing an Information architecture.

Only then, after deciding on the type of content you need and the structure that it should exist in online, can you start with the issues of Developing the content.

Why is it important?
Most web users are interested in the content of a web site, regardless of whether they're doing research, shopping or 'surfing'. Web users scan pages quickly for information and they expect the site's structure, design and content to make this easy. Good content development makes this process easier for users, and ensures that content is engaging, relevant and works well in the web medium.

Building a Findable Blog - Blogging Best Practices To Improve Findability

2009-06-13T21:49:00.002-04:00

Content and Structure
The content and structure are two important role for a web site, because it generate search traffic and helps users find the point of your site. Sometimes, you should think about that what types of content you should write, in order to attract people's attention. Using some traffic analysis tools to see how dose your site works. Discovering the most popular posts in your blog. It will help you define the topics of future.

The following simple but critical ways can make your blog successful.

Write Regularly on a Focused Topic
Define your primary subject for your blog and stick to it. If your posts are not related to your subject, it will miss understanding of the blog. If you focus on one subject and your posts are good, it will attract the old readers to com back to see your blog.

Link Often
Rather than just writing about interesting things, offer more links to your posts. To show the readers where can find more information about the topic.

Create Your Own Template
To create your own template design for your blog can help you specialize your blog. The blog has its identity, so it becomes different from the others. You can design your own style, color, images, and structures for the blog. Once you've settled on a template you like, make some quick modifications to the HTML to improve SEO.

Put Keywords in Your Post Titles
Heading tags are an important place to position your keywords to help encourage search referrals.
A good post title will sum up the post using some of its important keywords and phrases.

Summarize Post To Direct Traffic Better
Of course, a good title is always the first point to attract people's attention. After they go to your site, a brief summarize can help them to understand your site, and to direct traffic better.

Popular Posts & Recent Posts
Adding both popular posts and recent posts help increase the visitors to your blog. The difference between them are popular posts attract new viewers, and recent posts attract repeat visitors.

Share Your Content With Others
Some blog platforms like WordPress offer extensions to their system that will automatically add social networking links to the end of your blog posts to encourage users to share your URL. It is other way to increase your traffic.

Writing Copy for the Web - 2(The Inverted Pyramid)

2009-06-07T20:56:00.002-04:00

The Inverted Pyramid
The normal pyramid-style may be good for academic writing... It starts from the foundational information, and then the information are sorted into smaller summaries. Finally, there will be come up with a brief conclusion. But, This style is totally inappropriate for the vast majority of web content. Actually, we use the Inverted Pyramid-style for writing the web content.

The Inverted Pyramid putting the essential information first, which it follows with further detail. In this way, it helps the reader to overview the website quickly, and it give them a idea of the web. So, the readers can know whether it is the right website they want. Also, if it is the right one, they can get the point and purpose of page instantly.

Writing Copy for the Web - 1

2009-05-31T00:44:00.002-04:00

Put more important content first (front-loading)
- Short and succinct
Remove any paragraphs, sentences and words that don't directly help get your point across. Can you find ways to say something in fewer words?
-Front-load everything
Front-loading also applies to paragraphs and sentences. Start paragraphs with the most relevant words, to work like a header to the paragraph.

Use headlines and headings
-attractive headline can make the difference between the page being read or ignored
-clear headings can help the readers easy to find what they want
-Use headings within a document to make it easy to scan the document's meaning

Consider the user's goal
-Be factual, not cryptic
Your tone of voice should be immediately appropriate to the audience, and their relationship with the site.
Don't be cryptic. Don't assume you have your audience's undivided attention. You probably don't. You really have to work to grab someone's attention online.
Being factual means avoiding starting with questions (e.g. "Have you ever found blah blah? Well, this is the thing for you!").

Establish trust
Real example
The following text came off a 'Contact me' page.
"Hello, and welcome to the contact page. It is on this page that you can email me via the form on the left, or you can use the means of contact below"
You could replace all that with:
a) A title somewhere saying "contact me"b) A title next to the email box saying "email me"

Use Active voice
Active voice is good, Passive voice is bad. This is because passive voice uses slightly more words than Active, and takes slightly more decoding.
e.g.
"Upload new contact information on the contact us page"
is better than
"New contact information can be uploaded on the contact us page"

Definition of Web Content Development

2009-05-30T16:46:00.001-04:00

We should think about what Web Content Development is.

Wikepedia defines it like this:

Web content development is the process of researching, writing, gathering, organizing, and editing information for publication on web sites. Web site content may consist of prose, graphics, pictures, recordings, movies or other media assets that could be distributed by a hypertext transfer protocol server, and viewed by a web browser

There is alot more to read about it. If you go to Wikepedia you can learn more

Web Standard

2009-05-25T17:11:00.002-04:00

Topic – “Describe when and how web standards were created and discuss their importance and use for Web content development?”

How do designers design the content of websites? There should be a particular standard to unify it, and then we have the web standard. The web standard is not only a singular standard. It is a collection of a set of criteria. The main web page consists of three parts: structure, presentation, and behaviour. There are three standards that correspond to them. The standard languages of structure include XHTML and XML; the standard languages of presentation include CSS; the standards of behaviour include object models (such as the W3C DOM), and ECMAScirpt. Most of these standards were drafted and published by the W3C. We can see that W3C is important for the web.

W3C is the short form of World Wide Web Consortium. W3C was created at the Computer Science technology Laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute. The founder is the same person as the inventor, Tim Berners-Lee. In 1994, the “father of web”, Tim Berners-Lee, was aware of the way that the Internet network was not limited to a small number of people. The whole world can use the public information resources and communication resources. To achieve this goal, it is necessary to normalize the technology. Therefore, Tim Berners-Lee joined CERN, DARPA and the European Union to advocate and organize the core of Web technology institutions - W3C.

So far, W3C has developed more than 50 standards. Some of the standards we often hear about, including HTML, HTTP, URIs, XML and so on. A good standard can help the designer to write the code. Also, following a regular standard can achieve internationalization. So, with the constant renewal of web standards, we will make better websites.