Adding Content to Your Website

The next step after deciding upon the general look and layout of the website is to decide what content to add to it. We can break content into 3 broad categories:

Information
Entertainment
Sales

As you've surfed the WWW, you've probably seen pages and systems that fit into the above categories. You've probably seen systems that give way too much information on a product (and do so in a dry, technical manner), systems that are all bells and whistles with no content, and systems whose only focus is on getting you to order the product right now.

Our focus in designing commercial sites is to combine these three types of systems into one, and thus create a complete marketing tool. As we have already said, marketing is a combination of things that lead to commercial advancement, and not a single entity. What we are seeking is a balance of information, entertainment, and sales communications that will provide a complete communications package.

If, however, your business model is to make a content site and earn income through ads, you will have to add more of information and entertainment.

Basic Elements of a Commercial Web Website

These items should appear on every commercial WWW document:

Company name
Link to information on contacting company or company e-mail address
Page title
Author or contact person's e-mail address
Content
Link to home page
Date of creation or latest revision (on time-sensitive materials)
Statement of copyright
Hypertext link(s) to other related local pages
Company logo

1. Your company name and logo should appear on each page, so that it is clear to everyone, regardless of how they entered the system, who owns it. This also ties the Web system into any printed collateral.

2. Providing a link to information on contacting the company, or a company e-mail address, is crucial. Remember, this is two-way communication we're dealing with here. If the viewer can't get a hold of someone for ordering, further information, and so on, the system doesn't serve much of a purpose other than letting people know the company exists somewhere.

3. Many of these elements can be addressed in different ways. The company name and logo can be a graphic on each page, a banner in a frames system, or something else. You should address all of these items in some way, but the exact way you do it is your choice.

4. The author or contact person, often called the webmaster, should present an e-mail address, and a link to his/her e-mail, on every page if possible. This enables people to report problems with your pages. This sometimes becomes a nuisance, as there are people out there with way too much time on their hands who will fill your e-mail box with annoying observations. On high-traffic sites, you may want to drop the webmaster link after you're sure that most of the bugs have been worked out of the system.

5. A link to the system home page offers primitive navigation to people who may be unfamiliar with your other navigation tools, and it enables people to start over from the beginning. It's also useful if someone is accessing your system from anywhere other than the home page.

6. Press releases, technical updates, and other time-sensitive materials can include the date of creation and/or latest revision. If this is not something you want to make public (and there's really no reason to), you can include it in the code as a comment tag, or you can encode the date, revision and any other information on the bottom of the page (as in 080896r4).

7. Copyright law states that you needn't claim a document as having a copyright for it to be valid and legally yours, but it will help if you are ripped-off and need to take it to court. Your statement of copyright should look something like this: Copyright 1996, Hampton and Associates, All Rights Reserved.

8. Hypertext link(s) to other related local pages should be included for obvious reasons, but how and how many are a matter of style and application. For instance, don't link out in the middle of a paragraph if you want that paragraph to be read; instead, add a more information link at the end of the text.