Know your audience. The types of colors, images, and even words that you use will be different for one audience than it would be for another. Your plastic surgery site will have a whole different feel than a site designed for NASCAR fans. It’s important that you keep your visitors in mind when designing your site and writing content for it. One of the biggest mistakes that people make is designing a site and its content for themselves.
Highlight important content. Important text should be located at the top of a page. This will make it the first thing to show up on the screen and the first thing the visitor will see.
Get to the point. Visitors want to know immediately what your site is about and what you have to offer. Be sure to present the important issues right away on your homepage.
Make your title a descriptive one. Part of getting to the point is providing a title tag that is as descriptive as possible. This allows visitors to know exactly what they can find on your site and on a given page.
Keep it short. Keep your pages as short as possible. Visitors generally don’t like overly long pages that they must scroll down to read. Large amounts of text should be broken up into multiple pages. Similarly, with your important text, keep your sentences short and to the point. Remember that the Internet is fast-paced and people don’t like to read on the computer at a leisurely pace like they might a book.
Update your content. Your content should be checked and updated and new content added on a regular basis. Further, you should display the date of a page’s last update. Fresh, updated content gives visitors a reason to come back to your site.
Avoid technical jargon. Just as you must know your audience, it’s important that you write for them. This is particularly important when it comes to a site for plastic surgery. There are so many technical medical terms that can no doubt get confusing for the average person, so be sure that you put it all in laymen’s terms. You and your colleagues may refer to a facelift as rhytidectomy, but the average person still recognizes it as a facelift.
Double check your spelling. It’s amazing the sheer amount of spelling errors out on there on the Internet. This can damage your credibility, and yet it’s one of the easiest things to fix.
Avoid the ‘Under Construction’ page. If a page isn’t finished, then it’s simply not ready to be put on your site. Visitors generally hate the ‘Under Construction’ page so avoid doing this.
Get feedback. There is a lot that can be learned from your visitors. Provide them with an option to contact you and give you their feedback. There’s no more direct way to find out exactly what your site visitors want.