by Mark Bloom | Aug 8, 2017 | Agency Advice
Web Developers: Write the Content for Clients
If you own or work for an internet agency — such as a web development firm, an SEO marketing concern, a branding or design company or in-house marketing department — you provide services to your clients to:
- Develop an online presence or storefront
- Get them noticed online
- Generate traffic to their website
- Attract the “right” audience, those who already may be looking for their products or services
- Help them convert those visitors into paying customers
- In general, help them succeed
How well you succeed is measured by your clients’ return on investment and increase in brand awareness. In other words, the better your clients do, the better you look. If you want referrals, that gold mine of qualified leads, then you must deliver satisfaction.
Why Content Matters
You know the answer to this already. But remember that content can include words, pictures and videos. Content is anything visitors can consume — anything that answers their questions or engages their minds … or their funny bones. Content can take many forms; it depends on its purpose and its intended audience.
Online content for clients — whether for their website, blog or social media — must fulfill its purpose:
- Attract those people or businesses who may be interested in your clients’ products or services
- Answer their questions about your clients’ business or industry
- Generate trust in your clients’ business
- Persuade visitors or readers to contact your clients
Why Your Clients Shouldn’t Write Their Own Content
Obviously, creating videos, photos and graphics takes specific skills — skills your clients may not possess. But anyone with a computer can write. Your clients may insist on creating their own written content. Here’s why you should stop them and deliver content for clients as part of your services:
- Content delay. The number one reason to avoid letting your clients write their own content is that they may never actually do it. They may have good intentions. They may think your deadline is far enough out to make the project feasible, but crises are a part of business, and website content often gets pushed down to the bottom of the priority list. When the deadline comes and goes, it becomes content delay, and suddenly, it’s your problem.
- It’s marketing. Unless your clients have a full marketing department, they may assign the task of writing the content to the wrong person. A website, blog or social media isn’t necessarily a platform for advertising or customer service. Sure, those things matter, but not as much as marketing: building their brand awareness, nurturing their potential customers and generating an online presence that can stand out. Online content has to connect with its intended audience.
- Quality suffers. Your clients may know their business inside and out. They may know their customers top to bottom. But they may not know how to approach online content writing. When you produce the content for clients, you provide what they need, instead of what they want. You know what it takes for your clients to succeed in the online environment. And if you don’t, you know you can find a third-party subcontractor like Ray Access who does understand the online world and can deliver content for clients of every industry.
- Differences abound. Your clients understand the difference between video and photos, but they may not understand the difference between website content and blog posts. These two platforms serve different functions. If your clients write blog posts as web pages or web pages for blog posts, they won’t succeed. You need to step in to create the kind of content for clients that works for its intended purpose.
To truly stand out, your clients need good, effective content. If you can deliver that for them, your firm can also rise above the crowd in a competitive market. You can only do that by taking charge of the project. Don’t let your clients write their own content.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Elle Ray | Aug 1, 2017 | Agency Advice
Website Developers Who Do It All Are History
The field of website development has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. Most businesses now require their website developer to wear many hats — and often, a cape as well. They want their developer to be everything from a problem solver to a poet, from a graphic designer to a guru. Your web developer has to know not only how to build your website, but also where everything should go, what your website should do, who it’s for and why visitors will be drawn to the site.
Now add therapist, marketing expert, artist, photographer, structural designer, information architect and project manager into the mix, and you’ve got a recipe for a superhuman — someone more at home in a Marvel comic book than in the real world. That’s what website developers are up against, when really, they’re just human beings who are most comfortable working at a computer all day.
The Origin Story
It used to be — in the long-forgotten stone age of the internet, the 1990s — that all you needed was a nerd with a knack for writing code to become your website developer. There was little more to a website than lines of text created from Hypertext Markup Language (aka HTML). Just being able to share this text with other web users around the globe was amazing enough.
When Mosaic hit the scene in the late 1990s, the web developer world went crazy. Everyone realized they were sitting on the cutting edge of, well, everything. Graphics, movies, games, online shopping: as fast as web developers could dream up new ideas for what was then called the “world wide web,” they could quickly make it become a reality. Creative website developers were creating their own obsolescence in a way, everyday.
Until… Kaboom!
Bigger bandwidth, broader networks and multimedia gave website developers more toys — and challenges — than ever before. To stand out among a growing crowd, they had to use every trick in the book. And when mobile devices hit the scene hard after the tech bubble crash in 2001, all bets were off.
Web developers were starting to get savvy; no longer was it cool just to be a nerd with an idea to code. Nerds had to learn to talk to corporate types, sell their ideas and get funding for their new apps if they were going to survive. Video streaming, ecommerce applications and a slew of new multimedia options exploded online. Only the smartest, nimblest and sometimes luckiest nerds could keep up.
But the few who made it — and you know their names — made a big splash; now they count their assets by the million. They set a shiny bar really high, and with so much promise, so much potential in the internet still to come, no developer worth his weight in sim cards wants to quit, especially in the age of IoT — the Internet of Things era — when everything from your TV to your toilet is getting connected and upgraded.
It Takes a Village
Yes, that’s a cliché, but guess what — phrases like “it takes a village” become clichés when they’ve been true for so long and have been repeated so often that they’ve become kind of folk legends. But today, only a very few small-town website developers, those who service mainly the micro-business community consisting mainly of solopreneurs, can do it all. They’ve got to have a good eye for aesthetics, the knack for coding, an idea of what content to plug in and the customer service talent to manage clients who often expect excellent everything for as little as a couple hundred dollars.
That breed of superhuman is dying out, just as successful door-to-door encyclopedia salesmen before them. Today, the most proficient website developers work with a team. Any website professional who claims he can do it all likely can’t do any of it well. It’s too much to know and be really good at. Specialization makes website developers more efficient; they can focus on what they love to do: sit in front of a computer all day and code.
A Team Approach
Being part of a team allows for a greater depth and variety of projects. It makes life more interesting when you can bounce ideas and opinions off of other professionals whose expertise lies in other areas. Large website development firms employ more specialists, while smaller, more nimble development companies use third-party contractors — including Ray Access.
Every website development team relies heavily on project managers who keep it all together and keep the client happy. The other skills inherent in every website developer’s process include:
- Envisioning the total project
- Developing a navigational structure
- Writing compelling content
- Designing the look and feel
- Coding to build the website
- Drawing graphical elements
- Shooting professional photographs
- Making engaging videos
- Editing the content
- Marketing the website
The lone web developer — one who envisions, develops, writes, designs, codes, draws, shoots, makes, edits and markets his own website is one of those rare birds who soon will appear on Wikipedia as an endangered species. While everyone loves superheroes, being one takes a lot of dedication and diversification. If you need help with a certain specialty, find it.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
by Mark Bloom | Aug 16, 2016 | Agency Advice
Web Developers and Businesses Both Suffer
Content delays reflect those endless days, weeks or even months of waiting when you’ve completed website design and development, but there’s no approved content for the new site. You’ve slaved over the design, maybe going through several iterations to please your client. You’ve sweated the details to deliver a thing of beauty that’s guaranteed to make a splash.
Meanwhile, your client had no idea a new website was going to take so much time and energy. The old one only took a month to put together five years ago (although it shows, and you’ve persuaded them a new site is in his best interest). But you can’t use the content from that old site because of the changes, so the project screeches to a halt and content delays keep everything from moving forward.
Nobody Wins During a Content Delay
Content is often one of the last pieces of a website project. All that work to get to this point — all the pressure, all the deadlines — now seems like wasted effort. It seems so simple: just write down some words that describe the product or service. And yet, the client can’t seem to deliver anything, even though he’s had months to do this one little task.
Content delays are frustrating for everyone involved:
- You can’t close the project and collect your final payment until the website is live — and you can’t publish the new site without content.
- Your client can’t reap the benefits of the new website you built until it’s online — but he didn’t realize writing content for it was going to be so difficult.
So you’re stuck, your client’s stuck, and every day that passes, you both feel worse about starting the project in the first place. If this scenario sounds familiar, you’ve experienced a content delay that has sucked the energy out of a client relationship more thoroughly than even a nasty lawsuit.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Here are three ways to avoid content delays.
1. Get the Content First
If you could go back in time to the beginning of that website project, you might insist that your client deliver the new content before you start. So learn from your mistake and insist on it for your next project. Build it into the schedule — right at the beginning — and insist that you can’t move forward without approved content.
That’s not to say that the content won’t change at all, but at least you’ll have valid content that someone has reviewed before you put in the hours, days and weeks needed to design a website. You’ll have content that’s “good enough” for a website launch. And you’ll have content that reflects your client’s business from the inside. That’s valuable when designing for that client.
Smart website designers, in fact, prefer to design to the content, instead of trying to fit the content into a new design. In this way, form meets function, which improves the visitor experience on all levels. The website you produce, in the end, will be more effective, making you, your client and your client’s customers happier.
2. Prioritize the User Experience (UX)
You design and build websites for clients, but your clients really aren’t the people who’ll use the website. Their website has to attract and please visitors. So consider adding a UX specialist to your team. When you focus attention on the user experience of a website, the content naturally becomes part of the conversation. In the design process, therefore, content is an important deliverable, not an add-on line item.
User-centered design has been a trend in software since the days of the “helpful” Microsoft Office paperclip — “It looks like you’re trying to write a resume; do you want to use a thesaurus?” The industry has thankfully progressed well past that disaster. Now software is much more intuitive. Websites should be as well.
To avoid content delays, you must prioritize the content. If it’s important to a visitor’s website experience, it becomes important enough to devote resources to. Content delays often happen because no one thinks about the website content until the end of the project. A UX specialist would make it a priority.
3. Hire Professional Content Providers
Professional content providers like Ray Access specialize in effective content no matter what the industry, service or product. Not only can they research the topic so that they can write authoritatively about it, but they also understand how to use keywords, which in conjunction with search engine optimization helps people find the website online. Even the best site does nothing if no one can find it.
The professional writers and editors at Ray Access deliver an additional benefit to combat content delays: they are deadline-driven and deliver on time, every time. That means you’ll receive the content you need in time to keep your project on track. Your client will have the time to review — and if necessary, call for revisions of — the website content well in advance of your deadline to launch the site.
Effective content connects with the audience, providing a positive user experience. But only if you don’t have to wait weeks for it from your client. Be proactive and budget for a professional writer right from the start. Learn about the range of services Ray Access offers web developers and designers — agencies that have suffered from content delays.
Ray Access is a content marketing firm that delivers targeted words to empower your business. Contact us about your specific project to receive a quote or discuss your needs. We write website copy, blog posts, e-newsletters and more. Everything we do is thoroughly researched, professionally edited and guaranteed original.
