Customize Website Content

Often times taking the time to make your websites content look nice gets overlooked.  We for the most part are still guilty of this, many people say our articles and lessons are pretty boring to look at and read due to a lack of images and too many text blocks.  We are addressing the issue and hopefully soon our website will be a lot nicer to look at but in the mean time lets talk a little about some tricks of the trade that you can you to help spruce up your website.

Customizing Text:
It is really important to take the time after writing any content to go back through it and make sure it reads ok.  You have to make sure peoples eyes don’t just glaze over after seeing a huge block of text.  The key is to break up your text with short parahraphs, bulleted lists, and things like different fonts or quotations.  We are not saying its important to go crazy spending an hour customizing your text, its just important to keep your reader in mind when typing anything.  Below are 5 tips you can use as a guidline.

1.    Make Sure To User Headers & Sub Headers
2.    Use Bulleted or Numbered Lists To Break Up Content
3.    Segment Your Page Into Small Easy To Read Chunks
4.    Embrace The Scan-Make Sure information is easy to find
5.    Make Your Point Early And Often

Changing Colors:
You will want to be careful not making your page look like a box of crayons but it is important to use color to help offset some of your headlines and other important pieces of text.  You will want to try and follow the same guidelines and color scheme of the entire website but having a different color for your headers sure is nice in comparison to simply bolding everything.  Below is an HTML color chart to use

http://www.eligr.com/images/colors.gif

Adding Pictures To Your Website:
Pictures are the most overlooked features of content.  In many cases they are completely forgotten and can really make an article pop.  Now the first tier of what people do is basically using stock photos or grabbing pictures off other peoples websites, this is a place to start that’s for sure.  As you grow your website you will want to take the time to do some custom graphics, screen captures, logos, and so on.  Having never been blessed with a knack for the artful we always have to outsource, that said you can get some really nice looking graphics for a few bucks.

A few tips to keep in mind about images:
1.    Keep the file size small so they don’t take forever to load
2.    Don’t use too many of them maybe 1-2 per 500 word article is enough
3.    Always use a caption, people always read those
4.    Try to add value with your images with charts and such
5.    Don’t steal!

The point of this lesson is that you should take the time to make sure your aritlces, website content, blog posts, or whatever you put on your website looks nice otherwise nobody will read it.  You have to always keep the human factor in mind when it comes to website design.