Content Types

A guide to the different types of content.

If there is one thing that differentiates great web sites from average or bad ones, I would say it is original and unique content. Even though design gets a lot of attention, I would rather have a badly-designed page with great content than a page with a great design and average content.

I don't mean to imply that you can't have both but you will most likely have to choose what areas to allocate your limited time to. I've seen high-traffic pages that I know get tons of traffic and make a lot of money but have bad designs. It's probably because the webmaster is spending so much time putting up content and marketing his site he hasn't had time to package it right.

Creating unique content is harder than it seems and takes longer than you think. If you are in the process of writing your content and you are cranking out two pages a day then I think you are doing pretty good. One page a day might even be a more reasonable estimate. This means that if you were to put up a site with 100 pages of original content then it would take you 3 months at 2 pages per day or 6 months at 1 page a day.

The key to good content is creativity. You have to think of ideas that haven't been taken advantage of on the internet yet. Unfortunately, I'm not sure if creativity is something you can acquire. Fortunately, there are some general principles you can use to come up with ideas. For one, you can go into some of the web forums dedicated to the the subject matter of your page and look at the different duscussions. Another is to look at your competition for new ideas. Creating a website completly based on originial content is basically no different than writing a book.

One thing to note is that out of the 6 main areas of being a webmaster (Planning, Coding, Creation, Content, Marketing, and Operations) the content section is the smallest section on this site. This is not because it is the easiest or the least important part of putting up a page. It is because choosing the subject matter of the content is going to be an individual decision that will be up to you. I can't tell you what to put on your page, I can only try to clarify the different types of content and some strategies to make your content more robust.


 
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