When you design your website you will likely be concentrating on how it looks to visitors, how much it reflects your brand, and quite simply how good it looks. That’s all good and well and these are certainly things you need to bear in mind for your sites. However at the same time you also need to be thinking about something else – content management.
In essence a website can normally be defined as one of two things – either a ventricle of sorts for displaying content, or as an advert/flier. In the former case, content management is of utmost importance and this means that you need to have a good system for uploading your articles and for displaying and organizing them so that visitors can quickly see all the content you have on offer and then find the articles they’re looking for particularly.
Organization
In terms of organization then you need to make it clear what kinds of articles you have on display and how people can find them. The most important thing is that you have some brand new content right at the top of your site and that people can easily and quickly see where the latest article is. This will ensure that right away they are hooked and reading something rather than getting bored searching around for something to read and it will make it clear to people coming back what’s new.
At the same time though you will likely have an ever growing back catalogue of articles and the best way to organize these is with some sort of category system/sub categories so that people can quickly find the specific articles they are looking for. This might mean if you have an SEO website you have one category on link building, one on site design and one for news, or it might mean if you have a website on bodybuilding that you have a supplement review section, an ‘exercises’ section and an editorial section. This way people can quickly find what they’re looking for and browse the content without having to look at a huge and uninteresting looking list.
You should also though include an archive of some sort where visitors can look through all of your articles historically. This will enable them to see the sheer size of your backlogue and it will be good for your SEO as well.
Submission
Furthermore you should also ensure that you have a good system for quickly and easily submitting and editing articles on your own site. If every time you write an article you are forced to go through and code it by inserting all the
tags and meta tags then you will find that you often quite simply can’t be bothered and so don’t go ahead.
By making it as easy as possible for you to upload articles and edit existing ones you thus encourage yourself to be vigilant in uploading content and you also make it possible for other people to help you out. This is one of the big reasons that many people use WordPress which is an excellent built-in content management system, but you can also ask your web designer to make you something using PHP that will allow you to automatically upload articles to your site no matter how it’s coded.
This guest post was written by Brian. He recently used services of a company doing web development Melbourne. Needless to say that he opted for WordPress over static HTML website.