Folks who want to take the easy way out when populating their Web sites with content snatch up as many reprint articles as they can. (Reprint articles refer to that small pool of articles that gets replicated out onto a gazillion Web sites, kind of like that Agent Smith guy in The Matrix.) You can get reprint articles anywhere. A ton of content syndicates are online where you can purchase articles for a few dollars, but so can everyone else.
You can even use public domain works — those written articles and books for which copyright has expired and thus have slipped back into the public domain. You can publish them without the permission of the author, but again, so can everyone else.
If you want truly original content, you have to do it the hard way — you have to write it or hire someone else to write it.
Creating original content
Writing your own articles and blog posts isn’t as hard as it sounds unless you have hundreds of Web pages to populate, which could become a very timeconsuming effort. If that’s the case, you’ll have to use some reprints, but it’s still best if you try to keep the most important pages on your site filled with original content.
Coming up with ideas for your original content isn’t too difficult. If you don’t already have a list of ideas based on what you know your visitors are looking for, spend about an hour brainstorming some ideas. You won’t use them all, and some of them will be just plain silly, but you’ll come up with somegood ideas. Here’s a secret every writer knows: The more you write, the more ideas you have.
When it’s time to actually write the articles for your Web site, a few basic principles should be applied. These principles help make it easy for your site visitors to read your articles. The short list looks like this:
Article layout: The experience of reading on-screen is very different from reading on paper. On-screen, it’s much easier to get lost. Eye strain is also much more common when you focus on a computer screen for too long. Computer screens have an invisible bar that scrolls across the screen refreshing the image constantly. If you’ve ever seen a computer on TV that has a black line scrolling through it, that’s what I’m talking about.
You don’t see this line because of the rate that it rolls across your screen, but it causes slight vision anomalies that your eyes pick up on, even though it doesn’t register in your brain. These anomalies are what
One way to combat eye strain is to keep your articles as sparse as possible. That doesn’t mean skimping on the content but does means you need to use lots of white space — open space without words — and use a type font that’s screen-reading friendly.
It works best when you’re laying out your articles if you single space (or even use a space and a half) between each paragraph of type. Also try to keep your paragraphs short and resist the urge to pack everything, kitchen-sink style, into a single sentence. Long sentences are easy to get lost in.
Between paragraphs, use a double space. The extra white space between paragraphs gives the eyes a second to rest before moving into the new text.
Reading-friendly colors: Color can be your best friend or your worst enemy online. The first thing to remember when dealing with Web site colors is that colors display differently on-screen than they do on paper and colors display slightly differently on different screens. So test your colors in the real world — online rather than on paper. It wouldn’t hurt to take a peek at your Web masterpiece from a few different computers.
The second thing to keep in mind when dealing with colors is that computers are already prone to causing eyestrain, so if you use wild colors on your Web site, that exacerbates the problem. Believe me: Nothing’s worse than clicking through a link to find a Web site with a black or dark blue background and yellow type. It’s hard to read and will send your leaders clicking back to where they came from.
It’s always better to stick with muted colors, and white or black text. Some of the most successful Web sites online have white backgrounds with black text. These combinations are not only natural, they’re also eye friendly. Even a black background with white text can get tiring nvery quickly. So, if you absolutely insist that your Web site have broad swaths of color, try to make it something that you don’t mind staring
at for five to ten minutes. If you can’t read a whole article in the color scheme that you choose for your site, find a different color scheme. If you don’t, your visitors will go elsewhere.
Titles and headings: Because reading is much more of a chore online, many people don’t completely read everything. Those who do read everything skim a page first just to make sure it’ll be worth their time to read through it. That means you need to catch your visitors’ attention as quickly as possible.
The best way to do that is with your article or blog post titles and headers. Titles are the first impression you get to make with your article. They should be catchy and in a larger font than the rest of the article. It’s also a good idea to make them bold to stand out.
Headings are the mini-titles that signal new sections of your article or blog post. Like titles, they should be larger than the text surrounding them (but not as large as the title size) and should be in bold type-face.
This makes them both easy to skim and easier to read.
You want your headings to be catchy, but they need to be descriptive as well. It does no good at all to use a header like, “Lost in Space,” whenyour article is about pruning your prize roses. Readers won’t get it, so
they won’t connect the dots. A better heading might be something like “A Snip in Time.”
There’s an added bonus to using apt titles and headings in your articles — titles and headers are often closely examined by search engine crawlers in their ongoing attempts to correctly categorize your site. The crawler pounces on titles and headings to determine the content on your site, so be sure to fill such elements with appropriate keywords and phrases whenever possible.
