What to Write on your Business Website

The importance of content

A website without content is like a restaurant without food or a newspaper without stories.

What is Content?

Content is what you say to your visitors.
Politicians, priests and lawyers are all judged by what they say. Your website too will be judged by what it says, so know your stuff and be interesting.

How to decide what to say?

First decide:
Who are we talking to? Who is the website for? How will it benefit them? What are the goals of the site?
Learn from others. How do other people promote themselves and their product?
Ask yourself what you would want to know if you were hiring someone to do your job.

Who is the website for?

You
Your workforce
Your friends and family
Your clients
Your potential clients
Anybody with an interest.

How will the website benefit them?

If you went to a school reunion and told them about your site would they say “That’s nice, are you the secretary, or the tea lady who answers the calls” when you’re really the CEO. Your website should be an ego boosting self promotion for you, portraying you as smart, successful , pleasant and productive.

Your site offers an excellent opportunity to enhance your relationship with your employees and associates. Your workforce should be presented in a very positive light. Their friends families may come to the site to look for information.

It should inspire your friends, family and business associates to promote your company without being concerned about the consequences of sending people to your site.

The site should also be useful to clients and potential clients. They have questions and concerns. Your site should answer their questions, deal with their concerns and build a positive relationship with them.

Learn from other media

A good book or movie has interesting characters, an interesting story line (usually built around a challenge) and interesting dialogue. Your website should present your company as interesting people facing difficult challenges, showing how they overcome those challenges and satisfy the clients who hire them. Without challenges it’s hard to make stories interesting. If the Magnificent Seven didn’t have the challenge of taking on a gang of Mexican bandits they wouldn’t be the Magnificent Seven they’d be the seven guys who didn’t do anything.
Notice also that the people we care about in the magnificent Seven are the best delineated characters. The characters of the bad guys and the farmers aren’t drawn out or developed so no one really cares when they get shot. If you want people to care about your company its got to be about people.
Conclusion: Your web site should tell a story about what your business does, describe the characters involved and emphasize the difficult challenges you’ve overcome in working with clients.
While characters in movies often seem heroic resolving smaller challenges can require greater subtlety and skill.
Tasks

Describe characters involved: People in your business, and your clients.

Who they are, how they go about things, their history.

Identify the main challenges involved in doing your job
Identify the solutions you provided to meet those challenges
Describe the results of those solutions being implemented. (Detail matters).
Show feedback and testimonials from the client.

Think of your site as the defendant in a law suit. (Learn from Lawyers)

The prosecution has already spoken and demolished your companies standing. As anyone can build a website new businesses on the web are seen as dodgy by default.

You have to stand up and defend yourself against preconceived opinions of your business and businesses on the web in general. Not only that, but you have to grab the jury’s attention before you can put your message across.

Big chunks of text don’t do this. Provide images that show the outline of courses, videos of you giving a presentation, bulleted lists of what you offer and the benefits of your services. If you want to win the case you’ve got to be entertaining, informative and focused on building credibility.

Tasks

Identify any negative preconceptions people have of your business.
Identify sources of credibility that counter preconceptions eg.

Owning Premises
Expertise
Experience
Qualifications
Excellent Client List
Membership of respected organization (especially directorates)
Video of people from your organization
White Papers. etc

Develop a defense against these preconceptions.
Design the format of the defense.

Think of the Home Page as a newspaper or a billboard

We need headlines, pictures to grab people’s attention, a small part of the story to attract the reader to the whole story.

People driving past billboards have very little time to get the message. So the message has to be very clear, concise and bold. It’s the same with web sites.

You have around 3 seconds to capture peoples’ interest before they move on so have a simple clear message
to catch your visitor’s attention in big letters on the front page.

The front page of a newspaper isn’t one big block of text, your home page shouldn’t be either.

Think of your site as a Job Interview

Think of your site as a job interview. Can your site answer basic interview questions? For example:

What experience do you have?
Who have you worked with?
What did you do for them?
What did you think of them and what did they think of you?
What qualifications do you have? How do you work?

Visitors to your site have concerns as well as questions. Can your site deal with their concerns? For example someone hiring a training company to train their staff will be concerned about the character of the trainer. Will they be too aggressive or overbearing and upset the staff.

Will it represent your company well?

You don’t want your site representing you if it’s dull and uncommunicative just as you wouldn’t want a sales person like that.

The About Us Page

Your about us page should briefly describe what you do and bring to life the characters involved in your business. It’s best if there is more than one character. If you work solo, consider adding a strategic partners section. Only add people to your about us page if they’ll add credibility to your business. Recognized Experts and people with a record of success are best.
Then have a page for your clients who are also characters. Say something about the characters in your movie, but keep it relevant to your business and the challenges you face.
Then move on to the challenges your clients have presented you with. And how you have dealt with these challenges successfully.
The dialogue is what your clients say about you (testimonials) and what you say about them, build them up and be positive about your clients.
On your about us page don’t just include direct employees try adding associates who’ll make you look more credible. Your friends family and business associates are the SAS of your marketing campaign so you want to encourage them to talk about your company find reasons to put them on your site and if they do talk about you to people make sure the site doesn’t make them look bad by being second rate.
Think of the home page as the trailer for the movie. It points to the interesting parts of the site and attracts attention to them. If there aren’t any interesting parts to your site, its very hard to build the home page.
Examples of Home Pages and About Us Pages.

www.happycog.com about us page and home page,
www.chooba.eu about us page.

Some large companies like General Motors or General Electric divide their about us page into general areas like:

Company Profile
Company History
Company Principles

then link those areas to more detailed pages about each subject.