Creating Usable, Readable Content for your website.
The Starting Point

By Heather Woltz
April 2009

          Writing content and formatting so it is usable for the website is something that comes easier with practice. I have found that getting an idea of where you are, and where you want to be by setting goals will allow you to format and create usable content for your website. Here are a few examples of goals: do you want your visitor to fill out a contact form, purchase a product, call a phone number, or if it is just informational. You must answer these questions for each of the pages on your website to meet your goal(s).

          First, you have to start somewhere. Create a list of all of the pages you want on your website. Don’t worry about getting it perfect, you will find that during your creation of content will open other doors to how you want to organize your content. Remember, that you are laying out a site map, of what information will be on your website, don’t forget who your demographic is (i.e. customers, potential clients, or just someone who stumbled on your site).

          After you have a list of pages you want in your site, sometimes it is easiest to start at the beginning, the home page. Others have found that it is easiest to start in the middle. Either way, you will want to create a list of points for each page.

          When you have a few pages completed (with at least a few paragraphs) you will want to start thinking about keywords, and images for the site. Now to start thinking about layout. One thing that is great about the web, is that you can always try one way, then edit it down the road. So don’t feel like once you pick a layout that you are stuck with it forever. There are pros and cons for lots of layouts.

One Column This allows for a simple layout of content. However, can sometimes look daunting to the user. However, if you space paragraphs and format text appropriately, this can be very readable. You can use an image as an header (full width of the content) or even smaller images throughout the text.

Two Column More of a sense of a newspaper/newsletter type of layout, however, this can be good if you want to

Three Column This can be great when you have supplemental links or blurbs of other pages that are similar. They can go in both the left and the right columns, or maybe just one or the other.

Tip 1: On pages that have lots of content, decrease the font size, this will allow the user to read 

Tip 2: Don’t be afraid to try different formatting of text inside parapgraphs. Such as:  bold text or italic text. 

Tip 3: Be careful using the underline. On the web, this usually means that a word or phrase is a link. 

Tip 4: If you don’t have any photos available, you can always go to iStock; or any of the other free or pay by use image services; to spruce up your content. 

Tip 5: For best practice, don’t forget to ensure that all external links (links that are sites other than your own) open in new windows! This makes it much easier for the internet user to get back to your website, while still being able to read or follow links in your content.

Tip 6: Show your friends and family and see what they think! You might just be surprised at how helpful they might be!