Overcoming the challenges of content creation for informational websites — Smashing Magazine

Web applications and e-commerce sites may be getting all the love these days, but the majority of the web is still information, and most websites are still content-driven. Whether it’s a marketing site trying to convince you to buy a product or an informational site looking to educate and answer your questions, the web is still dominated by words. But unfortunately, these sites face two significant challenges:

1. According to the Nielsen Norman Groupusers read only 20 to 28% of a web page.
2. Most people who write content for the web lack the necessary skills, resulting in poor quality content.

In an ideal world, professionals will write our website copy, but this rarely happens, especially in larger organizations. Instead, we have an eclectic mix of people from all parts of the organization posting content online, which is why content quality is often poor.

Of course, complaining about this fact doesn’t fix anything. So what can we do to improve the copy on our websites when we have potentially dozens of inexperienced people posting the copy online?

Not surprisingly, there is no single magic answer that will fix the quality of our website content. However, there are four techniques we...