Welcome to our second day of talking about content! Today we’re going to tackle an important but sometimes confusing question—what exactly is “content”? What exactly are we making a case for here? We think you’ll be surprised by just how much content includes. Let’s dive right in.

Content is, in the broadest sense, all the textual, visual, or auditory material you encounter when you visit a website. It is all of the pieces that create the user experience. However, we’re limiting our discussion to textual content.

Let’s take the Blue Zoo Creative website, for example. When you go to our homepage, or even on this page you’re looking at now, where do you see words? Wherever you see words, that’s content. Even the little headers and descriptions, you might ask—yes! In order to have a totally successful website, you have to consider every word your customers see as content.

Here’s a brief list of places you should really focus on in thinking about how to maximize your impact in textual content:

• Headers
• Menus
• Buttons
• Titles
• Descriptions, especially of products
• Your brief homepage intro
• Your “About” page
• Contact page
• 404 error page (here’s a great example of a brilliant 404 error page)
• Newsletter or email sign-up box
• Testimonials or reviews
• News or blog

That’s not even a comprehensive list! There are many more places for content, like all your other pages, alt-text, tags, and sidebars. We could go on and on.

Every page of your website should have some kind of written content, even if it’s only a line.

Even if you’re a photographer? Yes! How else can you tell people what they’re looking at? Content is what really connects your images, products, or ideas to your audience. Content, even the stuff on buttons and your 404 error page, tells your audience what your business is like. They get your tone and style and personality from the kind of words you use on your website.

Now, we’re not saying you should dump an avalanche of words on your clients. A few carefully chosen lines or words will do much more for you than 100 empty words. What we’re advocating is using words, and thinking very carefully about them.

And that’s where we come in! At Blue Zoo Creative, we value your content as much as your design. When you choose to work with us to build your website, we have a pool of content writers and editors that can help you find the perfect words for every page of your site.

In our next post, we’ll be addressing how to think about your buttons, menus, contact page, etc.—what we like to call “invisible content.” Your audience may not realize that “invisible content” affects them, but it does! We want to show you how to make the most of it.