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So why beef up the content on your website? The logic goes that the more people you get to come to your website, the more business you get. Logical really …

It used to be said that success on a website was defined as a “conversion rate” of anything better than 1% — that is, for every 100 people coming to your website, one made a purchase.

Yet there is a potential problem. The more varied content one offers, the higher visitor numbers should rise and that is good. Conversely, the more varied the content one offers, the more varied one’s audience will be. In fact, much of your audience will consist of people who have no need for your prime service. By that logic, page views may go through the roof and sales double or treble, but the conversion rate will fall.

No matter. This is a case where it pays not to get caught up in the jargon. The key phrase is sales DOUBLING or TREBLING. There are some analogies with the retail idea of “pile it high and sell it cheap”, if you sell lots, you can afford a smaller profit margin, though that’s not the whole story. Getting many more people to come to your website will help to make your brand a household name. And as the business develops — and as markets develop too — the people that drift through the site today may be the customer of tomorrow looking for the product of the moment.

That’s why some content streams might not seem to be “target audience”. Your net needs to be spread further.

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Everyone likes good publicity: just look at the film posters quoting reviews of the movie. Of course, these can be misleading.

A recent blurb for the TV movie The Girl in the Café quoted The Oregonian newspaper:

“An endearing romantic comedy.”

What The Oregonian actually said was:

“This new offering from HBO Films is at its heart a bit of political propaganda wrapped into an endearing romantic comedy that starts losing its laughs when it gets to Reykjavik and decides its teachable moment has arrived.”

You can see more of these at Gelf Magazine.

You probably don’t have to be so economical with the actualité. But it’s not so easy to bathe in glory. One great content idea is a gallery of what people have said about your company or site. However, content usually comes with a price, and as we discovered recently with a CNBC video clip of our CEO, simply linking to a video or article is not enough. Within hours of linking to the clip on CNBC, they imposed a subscription-only tag. There’s nothing suspicious here: in a charged-content model, content is usually free for a set period before the curtain comes down.

News providers such as magazines, newspapers and broacast media have been arguing for years about charging for content (news agencies like Reuters and the Press Association survive by charging for content, but their main customers are the aforesaid magazines, newspapers and broacast media). Because the enduring ethos of the internet is “everything is free”, it’s been very difficult to get drive-by surfers to pay for anything. Some have tried. Most have failed. TIME magazine charged for content from their magazine for four years and made a profit (the only part of the operation that did!!), but when their sister site AOL decided to open up their content to everyone, TIME decided to drop the “curtain” — and still made a profit!

Incidentally, TIME used to charge for magazine content seven days after it hit the newsstands on the basis that people would pay for a magazine online which they couldn’t buy on the streets. The exception were religious stories — which they charged for immediately: religious feeling as it is in the U.S., people would pay for that content at any time. Religious stories were the big money earners!

The fact is that some copy is off limits to non-payers (or at least non-subscribers), and while a “What They Say About Us” page would be great, it will not be easy.

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Sometimes you could almost believe in gremlins, the evil little creatures Second World War airmen used to blame for errors which cropped up inexplicably from time to time.

Every so often something breaks on a web site like JWC. It happened again “recently”: I can’t be more specific because I only noticed it this morning when I went to use one of the site content tools, the Unicode Converter: type in characters and it converts them to their unicode, hexadecimal or decimal NCR equivalent.

Only it didn’t. Type in something and the only conversion it made was to Unicode UTF-8. There were no error numbers, no warning messages. It just didn’t work. I spent an hour poring over the PHP but couldn’t find the error. Eventually, I went back to square one and copied the code afresh from sceneonthe.net, the web partnership where we originally developed it.

The content tool is back but I’m still none the wiser as to how it went wrong.

Why You Should

Broken pages are a content manager’s nightmare. They may be the result of a programming error or code innocently altered by authorised site admins, or they may be the result of something more sinister. Then there are dead hot links caused by unexpected updates and the rest.

Errors are bad for SEO; they imply lack of attention to detail or even lack of updates and the least updated sites are dead ones. So part of your routine as content manager must be in finding — and fixing — broken stuff, perhaps with a link-check program or browser plug-in or indeed some outside assistance.

Users of TIME’s web site were always pointing out broken links, or worse, broken code (there is a kind of elation when pointing out errors to organisations who should know better).

But don’t shy away from such feedback and encourage it: ask your visitors to report any errors they see. And remember that someone who has never made a mistake has never made anything.

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Which brings us to the thorny question of accessibility. Let me say here that I’m NOT an expert: I keep learning new things about it every day, sometimes even twice in a day, but I am an enthusiast, albeit a reformed one. (To read an expert’s blog on the subject go to 456 Berea Street.)

What is accessibility? Simply put, it is the concept that the interweb should be available to ALL people, regardless of their capabilities. (Some might say there are a few web designers out there whose work proves that point, and not in a good way.)

Immediately you say the word accessibility to most people, they will think “A-ha! Web pages for blind people!”

And they’d be wrong. One of the biggest “minorities” trying to use the web — and often failing — are dyslexics (I’d been a journalist for a decade when it was pointed out to by someone I was researching a story with that I’m mildly dyslexic. And why is the word so hard to spell?). Add to that people with movement difficulties and many other conditions associated with advancing years and you’ve got not a minority, but a majority that most of us will join in the years ahead.

I’ll be returning to the subject of accessibility soon.

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