Just what is content, anyway?
I saw a headline on AdAge.com recently. It went something like this: SEARCH ENGINES AS POPULAR AS CONTENT PAGES. I found that intriguing, so I bit.
The article is about a study by eMarketer which found people split their web page “views” pretty equally among search sites, e-commerce sites, content sites and communications sites.
I’ve seen people divide up the web this way before. The implication is that search engines, e-commerce sites (anyplace you purchase things) and communication sites (message boards, chat rooms, wikis?, blogs?) don’t have content. Content shows up only on sites with long, scrolling text where you can research the minutea of tulip bulbs or catch up on the daily news. Those are the people who need to think about content design, and if this study is right - users only go to those sites about a quarter of the time.
That is so not the case. Let’s start with e-commerce sites - a category including everything from Tiffany & Co. to Ebay. A broad spectrum of sites with two missions.
#1 Sell Stuff
#2 Enhance the Brand
That’s where people get the idea that these aren’t “content” sites. But they absolutely are. Don’t confuse the content of a site with the mission of a site. Every e-commerce site has content - and I don’t even mean all that text about privacy policies and how to return something you don’t like. The most important content on an e-commerce site is the catalog of products. This is very serious content and the heart of the site. it’s what users are looking for and wanting to read/watch/interact with. It’s the reason they come to the site. No matter what the “mission” of the site is defined as, users don’t think: Hey, let’s go improve my opinion of a brand. They think: I want to buy some shoes. It’s the list of shoes available from the store and the price - that’s the meat of the site. That’s the content. And the mismanaging of that content can short-circuit the mission of the site. They can’t buy the shoes if they can’t find what’s in stock.
Speaking of finding things - search sites are almost always said to have zero content. Again, I think this is wrong. The content on a search site is a list of links. This is how Yahoo got started, lo these many years ago. Some yahoo put up his personal bookmarks on a webpage and invited people to send him an e-mail if they put up a new web page. If he thought it was good, he would add it to his bookmarks.
Sure, the process has changed a lot - it’s no longer one guy’s list of useful links - but it’s still just a huge list of links. That list is the content on a search site. Users may not interact with it by scrolling down a text-heavy page, but the way you interact with content doesn’t define what content is.
And speaking of interaction, this brings us to communication sites. There’s another buzzword for these - they’re also called sites with “user-created content.” Yep, content. Just because the writers are contributing for free in an interactive manner doesn’t mean it’s not content. It may be fluid, temporary and of limited interest - but it’s still content. And to that community of users, it’s the most important content in the world. It’s theirs. They want to be able to pick it up and move it around and edit it and take it back whenever they want. The emphasis for web developers then shifts to the back-end: How do you give the user that kind of control over a web page? But if the focus goes too deeply into how to empower the user, it’s easy to lose track of what you’re empowering them to do. They won’t care if it’s exceptionally easy or pretty to type in their thoughts - if no one can read them.
Content is simply this: why do people come to a website? It’s not the how or the where, although how and where have a huge impact on the user experience. Why would people want to come here? What’s the meat of the site? That’s your content.