Content: When enough is enough OR Just because its a buffet, doesn’t mean you need to gorge

By Matt Morgan: Jan 22, 2010

Filed Under: Content

After sites are designed and built in code and implemented into their content management systems there comes a task that no one likes to do; content entry. It is a completely necessary part of web creation. Be it uploading all the content you painstakingly wrote out, or transferring it from your current site to your shiny new one, it has to be done.

This isn’t however, about the act of entering it all, but the amount of content that has to be entered.

We are living in a time where people are conversing through text messages, twitter and micro-blogging. We do not want to take the time to read something long unless we are really, really interested.

When coming up with content for your site, or reviewing content to transfer from your old site to another, take some time to think about how important that content is to a new reader. Not how important it is to you, how important it is to a reader. Think about your target market, and try to conceive them as someone who doesn’t own your business. It’s actually hard isn’t it. You should probably get a friend to help you. You also may want to hire a writer who writes for the internet (yes they exist). This should help you thin out your content into something that people will take the time to read it all.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes you need to have alot of content for your site to function properly, depending on your business. When your site has repeating content on multiple pages, and when you check your analytics to see where users are going, and you see that the page that is 5 steps down in your architecture and is repeated 7 or 8 times in other places isn’t getting any traffic, it may be time for you to do some Spring cleaning.

Disclaimer: Cleaning of your website is not limited to the Spring, the internet doesn’t actually have seasons, you can do it whenever you want.