Content Development

Back in 1996 Bill Gates famously trumpeted “content is king”. The statement still holds.

Content is why people visit your website. They are looking for information, or entertainment - or both.

Great content strikes a balance between your marketing goals and your users’ needs. Shift develops web content that supports your brand while making your site more valuable to your users.

Who are you talking to?

Web writers keep their audiences firmly in mind, all the time. Who are they? What do they care about? What do they want to find out or do?

Content writers put themselves in the shoes of your target audience, anticipate their questions and answer them, in a tone that resonates with the people you’re talking to.

The success of your website depends entirely on the quality of your content. A website can be beautiful, well-organised and fun, but without interesting stuff your users have no reason to visit. Shift’s designers, information architects and web writers work closely to create integrated websites that are built around what you have to offer, or say.

Writing for the web

It’s not only people viewing your content. Search engines like Google trawl the web, cataloguing, indexing and ranking content using complex algorithms that assess a page’s relevancy to particular keywords and contexts. Search engines frequently connect people with the valuable content on your site.

Search engines like content that is clear, well structured, with keywords in prominent places that relate to the page as a whole.

Structure is also important for your readers, as people don’t read a web page in the same way as a book or magazine. They skim and flick, fast. Shift web content is structured to help people to quickly find what they’re looking for. It’s also a great read.

Creating communities

Some web experts are beginning to question the importance of content in the face of current trends towards connectivity. At the heart of this debate is a fundamental question: what is better - connecting people with content, or connecting people with people?

The rise of social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace seem to support an argument for creating communities for their own sake. But sites like Friendster and Orkut, once the most popular sites of this kind, have tapered off in visitor numbers as new networking sites have been created.

Online networkers seem to be a fickle breed and can be quick to dump their community site to join the latest and greatest. But when communities are formed around quality content, users tend to stick around. Wikipedia is the world’s leading online encyclopedia resource, with well established communities around particular subjects.

Shift can help you build upon the content you have to create new experiences using the latest web technologies. And if you’re ready, we can help introduce a community to your site and transform it into an online resource that invites users to generate their own content.