The presentation of your content may have much more impact on your readers than you realize. Of course the actual words are the most important aspect, but if your content looks visually unappealing, your visitors may leave before they even have a chance to see if your content is high-quality and useful for their needs. In general, skip the fancy fonts and stay with Arial or Times New Roman for content in order to make it easy on the eyes. Don’t go crazy mixing fonts within your content as it can be very distracting to the reader. Of course you should use the tried and true techniques of web writing including headings, bullet points, short sentences within short paragraphs and a considerable amount of white space. Whatever font, font size and font color you choose, make sure to use them consistently throughout a single article.
Organizing Your Content
Once you’ve made a comprehensive inventory of the content you intend to put on your website, you need to understand what your users will want to see first. Especially if you have a considerable amount of information to deliver, with lots of links, there needs to be a formal method of organization instead of simply placing it willy-nilly throughout your site. You could organize alphabetically or numerically, but these techniques only work well for specific categories of content, and legal content is not really one of those. Organizing by format makes sense if you have a wide variety of different types of content such as tutorials, interviews, blog postings, white papers, etc. In the end you will simply need to sit down and determine which organizational scheme is the most logical for your particular content. So long as it is laid out in a commonsense manner, your web users will be able to quickly find what they are looking for—remember that when visitors have to squander precious time looking for information they are likely to become frustrated and go somewhere else.
Determine Your Content Goals Then Prioritize
Once you’ve determined the hierarchy of importance for your content you can tailor your specific content to meet those goals. If the primary purpose of your website is to provide high-quality information—with a secondary goal of gaining new clients—then your information and navigation must be conspicuously displayed and easy to navigate. Get to the root of what you feel is the most important content for your visitors, then display that content in the most prominent position. You want to ensure that visitors have to engage in the minimal amount of clicks in order to find exactly what they need.
Timeliness
Of course your website and blog should be continuously updated—letting a site or blog languish can truly be the kiss of death and can undo every good thing you’ve accomplished. It’s not enough to get your website going, start a blog, write for a few weeks then go MIA and in fact it can really hurt your business. You will want to update frequently with high-quality, informative content that will offer your readers something of value, keeping them coming back for more. To this end, make sure the date of your last revisions and/or the copyright dates are accurate, and that there is no outdated content anywhere on your site or blog.
Final Tips
To ensure your content is presented in a fresh, engaging manner which consistently grabs the attention of your users, take great pains to make sure there are never typos or grammatical errors, that your content provides useful links to other sites and that you maintain a consistent set of colors for hyperlinks so your visitors can easily tell whether they have visited a page or not. While content is king, content presentation can make or break your website.
