[Source Index] | [Feedback] [Article Contents]

Webify Your Soul: Content

No one else can say WHAT you should put into your pages or HOW you should connect all of it. That's up to your own genius to figure out. One way that I can see to help you with that, however, is to remind you that there are tens of millions of pages out there. Therefore, your pages either have to be better than all of them or different than any of them. In short, the question you ask yourself about your content should be, "What, if anything, is this page adding to the vast library of content that already exists?" Being totally and genuinely yours is a good start, If it's about you, it's going to be different. My personal distaste for painfully detailed life histories on a home-page aside, I do recognize one fact about the nature of the Web, it's about networks. Many people see networks as a bunch of computers talking to each other. The Internet, as a term, has a very mechanical, freedom-of-impersonal-anonymity air about it. The Internet, the Web, and networks, however, are really people using computers to talk to each other. The computers and the network hardware and communications infrastructure are simply tools. When my mail fills up with postings to the mailing list I subscribe to, it's messages from PEOPLE sent through their computer, their connection, and then the Net. Without its deeply personal components, without our different perspectives, biases, and failings, the Internet would be thousands of expensive appliances that did nothing more than wait for replies from each other (and possibly tell each other jokes in binary about us clueless humans).

The key to taking advantage of this medium is understanding the personal element, creating content that fills two basic human needs: your need to express your individuality and share your ideas and the needs of others to experience the diversity of the individualities of others and feed off of their ideas. Like I've already said, your audience comes to your site for entirely personal and selfish reasons. They are looking for something. If they find it, they will stay a while and absorb it and come back for more. If they don't, they will leave. This means that there is no substitute for real content. They want you to have knowledge they don't have and be able to express that knowledge in a way that's meaningful to them. Now, if they are looking for a particular type of knowledge or experience, and you can't provide it, you haven't automatically failed at creating something valuable. You can't be all things to all people. If, on the other hand, you never offer anything unique--for instance, if you do nothing more than post the alphabet in fixed width fonts or the listings for last night's TV shows or a message saying "the Future Home of Something Really Cool" or "This Site Is Under Construction", it will be hard to find anyone that will become transfixed with your page. If you didn't realize this before, I'll spell it out to you. Your goal as a designer is to provide your audience with content that compels them to return. Then, your goal is to repeat that over and over again.