Creating Valuable Web Content

"Letting Go Of The Words: Writing Web Content That Works" by Janish Redish

Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of this book focuses on one of the most important aspects to creating a successful web site: understanding your audience.  Redish gives 7 simple steps to understanding an audience:

• List your major audiences
• Gather information about your audience
• List major characteristics for each audience 
• Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stories
• Use the information to create personas
• Include the persona's goals and tasks
• Use your information to write scenarios for your site

All of these steps are self-explanatory, but that does not mean they are not important.  The more accurate you are in identifying your audiences and describing them, the better your personas will be.  If your personas reflect the true nature of those visiting your site, it will be much easier to cater your site to your audience.

Therefore, gathering information about your audience requires more than just thinking about the people you are trying to reach.  Actual research will help ensure that your personal biases about different groups and demographics do not hurt the efficiency of your web site.

According to Janish, when you have completed all seven of these steps, everything on your site should fulfill a scenario.  This will mean not only that your site has good content, but that it is all good content.  Every part of your site will have a purpose and users will navigate it with ease and satisfaction.

Chapter 3

 

In chapter 3, Janish discusses the importance of a home page.  Naturally, the home page is the most important page of your website.  The home page houses links to the rest of your site and organizes all of your content for your users.  The home page sets the tone and gives users an instant idea of what your site is about.  The home page can be used to establish your brand.  For a case study, let's look at ESPN's home page.

 
1.   Establish the brand.   The biggest word and the first word you see is ESPN in the top corner.  Although there is not a tagline to accompany the name, the tab in the browser reads "ESPN: The Worldwide Leader in Sports"

2.  Set the tone and personality.  ESPN is still a news network, so there are many aspects of the home page that are characteristic of one.  You have your top stories on the right with a featured story, or in this case, a highlight play, in the center of the screen, and additional, less popular stories categorized into different parts of the site if you scroll down.  They know a lot of men use the site so there is an ad for an action movie.  Also, there is enough color and pictures to remind us that it is about sports and it is engaging.

3.  Help people get a sense what the site is all about.  ESPN does this with their home page better than almost any other site.  It is immediately clear that the main focus is sports.

4.  Let people start key tasks immediately.  Everything you would need to go to ESPN's website to do is accessible from the homepage.  Creating an account, accessing fantasy sports or ESPN radio, shopping on the ESPN store, or just finding the last scores and reports in your favorite sports, it can all be done from the home page.  Also, these main tasks are all located at the top where you don't have to scroll down to find them.

5.  Send each person on the right way, effectively and efficiently.  If you successfully complete tasks 1-4, your site probably already accomplishes this.  But the key to this is having precise links that guide users to what they want without them having to think twice about it.  Also, it is important to use the users' language in your links so they can recognize what they want faster.  Fortunately, the language of sports is pretty clean cut.  ESPN does, however, provide an easy option at the top to convert the site to an Spanish, Asian, Australian, Brazilian, and UK version of their site, where different sports are popular and users will want different information.