Hail to the King! Why content should rule your world
There is a motto in the web industry - "content is king", and it's true. The content of your web site is what your audience visits the site for, what educates them about what you do, and satisfies their needs. Without good content, no matter how good a site looks, it will ultimately fail.
Like the design of a site, the content has several tasks to do. It must provide the information the visitor needs, communicate the organisation's message effectively, reassure the visitor that they are heading in the right direction and provide search engines with the key phrases they need to index the site effectively.
When writing copy for web sites it's important to balance what you want to say with what the visitor needs to find out. The tone of voice must be targeted both toward the intended audience and the copy's purpose.
The content can let a web site down. Care must be taken to ensure that copy is well written, spelt and punctuated correctly and has good grammar. The same attention to detail should be given to copy written for a web site as for print. Additionally, out of date and inaccurate content must be guarded against - don't have a news section if you are not going to update it frequently. All of these factors can give the appearance of an uncaring and unprofessional organisation.
It is not possible to produce a good web site by simply 'copy-and-pasting' existing materials. Any existing materials will need, at the very least, to be edited to fit the needs of a web site. In most cases not only will fresh copy need to be written, but existing materials will need major revision in order to work well on the web.
