Content

This is easily the most important element of your website, by far the most important drawing card on the web today. Before you contemplate how you want your site to look or behave, you should have a good idea of what you'd like it to do for you and your visitors!

Check out this poll:What do you look for when surfing the Web?

Corporate users have the easiest task in this regard, for there are usually definite goals for sales, marketing, promotion or service that establish a clear set of criteria to shape your website project. The larger the project, the more important it is to have a single method and organization of your various types of content to maintain a logical presentation to web-surfers. This starts with your front page, and should be maintained throughout the site.

Smaller businesses usually have more ambitious goals for a website, and a much more difficult job of attracting customers to their sites, due to the great sea of competing websites in similar fields and a lack of "brand" recognition. More than their larger corporate counterparts, they need to provide an excellent presentation to get results. The rate of technological change is still a major problem for many, many of us including those who are developing it, and the learning curve is very steep. Just check out the heaps of obsolete software manuals and books written on the subjects of the Web and software at your local store! Many of these books are less than a few years old, yet hopelessly outdated...

More than any other factor, the quality of the content on your website will make all the difference in the world. It will keep visitors returning by offering something valuable to them. Even amateur first-timers have created award winning sites by contributing something of value with the content they've posted to their websites. Maintaining "freshness" is another important issue.

Focus is perhaps the most important emerging factor in web-surfing! We have all been to these omnibus end all and be all type of "portal" sites that try to do everything, but only do a few things in a worthwhile manner. Developers still can score big time traffic by specializing in comprehensive and in depth topical discussions. Portal sites are slow and confusing to navigate, assuming the visitor is looking for something in particular, and generally only offer snippets of information on any subject.

Many tools exist to allow anyone to easily put content on the web in the simplest forms, and they can be very economical and practical for those who want to "get their feet wet" at web design!