BETTER WRITTEN CONTENT OR BETTER GRAPHICS????

That's a question you need ask if you use the Internet to promote a product or to sell a service.

It’s a question your web designer may answer with, “let’s have a website with lots of Flash animation. Let’s have a template with cascading scene changes, synchronized with booming audio files. Let’s have a talking head whose eyes move in response to the mouse. Let’s make your site a multi-media experience that will grab your visitors’ attention from the opening scene.”

Good idea? Well apart from the 5 minutes your site will take to download, I don’t think so.

And that’s not only because I’m a web content writer with a right-hemisphere challenged brain. Apparently most Internet users, if recent surveys are to be believed, don’t think so either. These surveys show that over 86 percent of first time site visitors want information that only the written word can provide. If these first time visitors found your site using keyword searches, this figure shoots up to more than 96 percent.

“If a picture is worth a thousand words, please paint me the Gettysburg address”

I don’t know who wrote that----as a writer I wish I had---but it’s very perceptive. It’s perceptive because it challenges accepted wisdom, something that most successful business people do regularly.  And it is probably the answer you should give to your web designer when he says, “let’s have lots of Flash animation, complex graphics and audio files.”

That or, “use Flash, lose cash.” And as for an audio file that plays automatically, I think most people find that very annoying: especially on a site where you can’t find the “switch off audio” button. I don’t have any researched evidence to prove that, just a lot of aggravating experiences that had me ready to throw my laptop out the window.

OK, you know my position. Written content is king for commercial websites. Now the question is-----

WHAT WRITTEN CONTENT WORKS BEST?

When I say written content, I’m not thinking of what I call “filler” pages or ‘spider food” pages. Filler pages are informative and are often available from the public domain. They provide your visitors with pertinent facts and help establish “bricks and mortar credibility for your virtual reality.” But that’s not the sort of content I’m talking about.

Let me explain.

If you are a golfer you will have heard the saying, “drive for show, chip and putt for dough.” Well your, “Home Page,”  “About Us” pages, your “Our Services” pages and other landing pages are your “putting” pages. Those pages are the ones that must answer your first time visitor’s questions, or convince them that the information is right there at your website, just a click away.

These portal pages must inspire visitors to suspend their 29 second attention span for, well, longer than 29 seconds. They must motivate your visitors to click a navigation-button prompt on your site, not the dreaded “Back” prompt on the tool bar.

Even the written content for your “FAQ” pages and “Contact Us” page needs to be considered if you want to motivate your visitors to become more than a bounce stat. on your Adword printout. Check the statistics and you’ll find leakage at every point in your website’s sales cycle. Leakage caused by poor copy.

The first job of good web copy is to make your visitors keep reading: to have them use the prompts in the way that you envisaged: to have them complete the “Contact Us” fields: to make them put your URL into their “Favorite’s” menu.

And that all starts with better written content. Content that firstly informs then inspires visitors to action.

Go to http://www.webinteractiveconsulting.com/business-writer.html for more information about how a good writer can transform lazy websites into sales dynamos while hoisting your rankings up the search engine ladder.