Not Rocket Science loves building websites for their customers. Websites help businesses reach their customers and potential ones. They can also help set your company or organization apart from the competition. Websites can be completely customized to your business and customer needs. If you need just an informational website about your company, we can do it. If you need an e-commerce website, we can do it. If you would like your company to have an intranet for employees to log in to and access certain pages and files, we can do that too.

We tell our customers that one of the hardest aspects of the website is content. It is also one of the most time-consuming parts of creating a website, but the content is extremely important to get correct. You should make sure that your customers can easily access what they are looking for. You must make sure that the content is up to date and you need at least the basics, such as about the company or organization and contact information. 

When you are creating the content for your website, will it still be relevant 5 years from now? Here are some great tips to ensure that your content is "future-ready."
 

1. Align Your Content Vision

Think about what is important in your content. Ask questions such as: 

• Why do we have this page/section/website? 
• Who is our audience?
• What does this audience need from us?
• What do we need to say the most?

Simple content is important for your audience. But what is "simple content?" Simple content is:

• as brief as possible
• written in plain language that can be easily understood
• should be written in chunks with clear headers, subheaders, (if applicable), and call outs
• clearly prioritizes the content from more important to the least important
• leads a user to take any action, such as contacting the company or purchasing a product

2. Map Your User's Paths and Create a Content Model

Map your user's paths to see what you think they will do step by step on your website. Test this by creating a Google Analytics account and looking in the data to see what these users are doing while they are on your website. Are they exiting the website after going to the home page? Where are users going after submitting a contact form? What pages on your website are the most popular? The content that is created from your research is called a "content model." Make your website's content to entice users to take the actions that you want them to do. Use "calls to action" on your website. They are specifically designed to turn website users into conversions, and hopefully customers or donors depending on your organization. When you are trying to figure out calls to action, answer the following question, "Why should users [insert action here]?" The action may be contacting you, donating, visiting a specific page, clicking on a case study, etc. For example, a non-profit may have a banner that states, "Make a difference in the lives of at-risk youth in our community. Take action today." That sounds a lot better than just "Donate today."

3.  Find Natural Patterns

Good websites pretty much have the same content pattern. They have specific categories of information and the content is broken up into chunks, which makes responsive design work better. The easiest way to do this is by doing a competitive analysis for your organization and look at their websites. Grab ideas, not content, and customize them to fit your brand. As a reminder, it is NOT OK to plagiarize! 

Summary

Using these tips to create your "future-ready" content will be beneficial for your business or organization in many ways. Your website's content will "sell" better because it's more relevant and helpful to your users. It reduces duplicate work and copy and pasting, gives a user a better experience on any screen such as a laptop, tablet, or smartphone, and also gives users a better experience in any section of the website because it will be easy to read from being categorized into chunks. Google Analytics is a helpful, free tool that you can use to make sure your website's content will be future-ready. We will be talking more about Google Analytics and how to make your website better in future articles, so stay tuned!

We hope that this article has been helpful to you. If you would like to see what we can do with websites, please contact us. Also, don't forget to follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn to learn about what is going on behind the scenes, learn more about the company, and interact with our "ask us anything" and "ask the audience" days!