Include a Call to Action
By: Diana
Date: Jul 05, 2008
Category: content, writing
When creating content for your website, decide exactly how you want your user to respond to what they've read. Do you want them to contact you? Make it very easy for them to do that by including the contact form or link to it. Do you want them to share the content with a friend, purchase the product, view other pages on your site, or leave a review? Make sure you lead them right to the action by offering them the option in an inviting way. Do not force them to action by boxing them in but do guide them towards your objective.
If you have content that is strictly informative, like a privacy policy for example, offer the user an action that keeps them on your site. You might ask "What would you like to do now?" and display links to interesting parts of your site. Even a simple "Return to Homepage" is better than no action at all.
Remember that web content is interactive. Unlike print media, your "reader" can act on whatever you write. More and more, your users will come to expect this. Make it easy for them. And make life easier on yourself by subscribing to the WGJ.
What is a Blog?
By: Diana
Date: Apr 12, 2008
Category: content, technology
is short for Weblog, a website with specialized software running in the background. Websites are basically text files, like a simple Word document, with "tags" in the text. HTML (hypertext markup language) is the collection of tags. In olden times, web designers had to know all the tags and web pages were created from scratch using Notepad. Nowadays, software like Dreamweaver and FrontPage put all the tags in, no HTML skills needed, though geeks like me hate the software-added code (cumbersome if not often wrong) and still prefer coding the old fashion way. Browser software like Netscape and Safari read the tags and display the words and images accordingly. Images are displayed by tags that tell the browser to "place this image file right here." The text files, along with any images the tags refer to, are stored on a communal hard drive called a server.
Think of a server as a huge filing cabinet sitting out on a street corner in New York City. You open a drawer and put your webpage files in the filing cabinet. The URL, http://www.spithra.com, is the address of that file, "corner of Seventh and Tenth Street, third drawer down, ninety-fourth file from the front, look at the first piece of paper in the folder." To make a website a blog, specialized weblogging software has to be stored on the server just like the other website files. The software structures the page design, provides an interface that makes posting daily entries easy, and organizes the new information in a sensible, chronological way.
Blogs can be personal or commercial, read by friends, customers, or potential customers. They can inform, educate, entertain, sell . . . they often do all four. Would you like some help adding a blog, or writing content for your blog? Contact us.