But this may not be a bad thing as long as the content of the website provides the answers your visitors need. Ask yourself if you really need that page – or if the information that is parked there would be better on more relevant pages.

Frequently Asked Questions are not Questions You Wish They Would Ask

This is a common mistake – adding a page full of information about your products and services, in a question-and-answer format, that isn’t what your customers want to know when they click onto a “Common Questions” or “Frequently Asked Questions” page.  A genuine Frequently Asked Questions page should support your site by reducing the number of common enquiries submitted to you by e-mail or on your customer service telephone number – and should not replace having quality copywriting and search engine optimisation on your content pages.

If your customers really ask “how do I order this from your site? What payment methods do you take? How much does delivery cost?” your page content should be optimised to include these details on relevant pages to ensure your users do not have to go searching for it instead of completing their purchase.

For example, if your site offers personalised car widgets, and your goal is to have customers contact you for a quote, the individual product pages should answer the questions that you think your customers should ask – or that they might actually ask – about the widget. The fewer clicks they have to make to find out that the A2019 widget they’re interested in is made of chrome-plated steel and takes up to 3 weeks to customise, the better.

Are you writing the right questions?

If you’re building a Common Questions page to reduce the volume of simple enquiry messages or calls, make sure you’re asking and answering the questions in an accessible way your readers will understand. Assume that your customers do not have inside knowledge of your industry and simplify the language – instead of saying “What vehicle manifold will my A2019 fit onto?” phrase the question as “Where can I attach my new widget?”

Your answer should be equally simple – remember that your readers will be skimming the content, and may only read the first couple of words of the answer.  Answer the question briefly in the first sentence, and explain it further if necessary:

Q. Where can I attach my new widget?

A. Rear-view mirror or external aerial. The widgets are designed to clip securely, with a rubberised grip to prevent scratching.

What questions should my Common Questions page answer, then?

The best answer to this is “The questions your customers have actually asked.” If you have an enquiries form or a customer service number, note down the questions and topics you are contacted about. When you’ve assembled half a dozen or so questions that have been asked more than once, it may be time to consider adding the questions and their answers to your website.

You can also solicit questions from your readers, to find out whether your content is providing the information a user needs – if multiple people ask the same question, it may be helpful to add that to a FAQ page, or to update the copy on the existing pages in order to answer the questions asked and improve the page’s relevance to your users.

Any questions?

If you visit www.wsi-ebizsolutions.biz and look through the site, are there any questions you have that you didn’t see an answer for?

I’d like you to ask them in the comments for this post.

Creating Great Website Content

Whilst it can be tempting to grab the nearest social media platform and launch a marketing assault, the absence of a measured, viable strategy will ultimately spell failure. Following are the remaining five steps towards building a better content strategy.

1. Multimedia is the Way Forward
In the age of YouTube, written content alone is unlikely to keep your readers engaged for long. Whether you’re using images, photos, videos or audio – a little multimedia content can go a long way. Stand out from the crowd, by livening up proceedings.

2. Share the Load
Ultimately, content is still king. Yet ensuring a fresh, steady flow of content can prove a daunting task, especially if you’re trying to run a business at the same time. The solution? Use those around you – colleagues, readers or fellow professionals. Don’t be shy, get others involved.

Whether you’re encouraging comments, reviews or regular guest slots, interaction is vital in establishing a strong profile and attracting credibility amongst your readership.

3. Stand Back and Observe
Have a hot piece of news? Don’t be fooled into thinking you’re the first to report it. You won’t be. With a camera in every pocket and the ease of publishing content via social media sites, news travels faster than ever these days. Instead, focus on providing a considered, unique commentary that encourages debate and social interaction.

Commentary is also a useful way to establish an identity for yourself or your brand. If people like what you’re saying, they’re going to want to hear more.

4. Don’t Fear the Feedback
Whichever platform you choose, it is vital to ensure that comments are enabled, easily visible and monitored. Reader feedback not only demonstrates client interaction, but is the most useful tool available for measuring your success. Google analytics may be one thing, but there is no better gauge than hearing it direct from the horse’s mouth.

Feedback also provides a useful breeding ground for fresh content and feature ideas.

5. Stop Talking and Listen
Remember – it’s not all about you. Part of building an established a credible profile lies in community participation. Spread yourself around a little and get involved with what’s being discussed by others in your arena.

Offering advice, commentary or recommendations can be an effective tool for raising your profile and attracting others to your own page(s).

Using word processor spell-checking software can help as well – but be aware of the following errors that a spell-checker might not catch:

Homonyms and How to Find Them

In common usage, homonyms are words that sound the same or are spelled the same, but have different meanings. Many of these similar words are misused in web copy, which can result in meanings that are not what you intended.

Commonly misused homonyms:
Your / You’re – The former is “the thing belonging to you”. The latter is short for “You are”.
You’re going to pick your favourite newsletter design.

Their / They’re / There – The first is “the thing belonging to them”. The second is short for  ”They are”. The last is a location.
They’re hosting their website on that server there.

Lose / Loose – The former is “to come to be without something”. The latter is “to be free of attachment or fastening”.
If you do not tighten that loose ring binder, you may lose the sheet with your password on it.

There are plenty of other words like this – where a word that sounds and looks similar is not going to convey what you mean in your web copy. Many word processing programs offer a grammar checking option as well as spell-checking – which can catch some of the most obvious of these.

Localisation / Localization

If you are writing for a targeted local audience, remember that certain words are spelled differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic – and writing with the spellings your target audience will help ensure they can find your site. For example, if you are a British manufacturer of lightweight metal soft drink cans wanting to expand into America, include the word “Aluminum” in your key words and descriptions as well as “Aluminium”.

The Rogue Apostrophe

So, you’ve read this far. Do you know how to catch a rogue apostrophe – sometimes known as an inverted comma? This is one of the most commonly misused pieces of punctuation on the Internet.

Do use apostrophes with:

Possessive words
If Jane owns a website, it is Jane’s website. Possessives have an apostrophe.

In the singular-possessive case, the website belongs to only one person or company, and this is indicated by the single possessive “Jane’s” with the apostrophe between the last letter of the name and an S.
In plural-possessive cases – for example the website belongs to two people named Bob – then it would be Bobs’ website – the apostrophe follows the S at the end.

The apostrophe usually follows names or objects ending in S – a site belonging to Chris would be Chris’ website. It is also acceptable to append this with another S – Chris’s website.

If multiple people of different names own the website, it would be Bob and Jane’s website – the possessive ‘s attaches to the last name of the list.

The exception to this is with the word “its”. That would be a possessive indicating that “it” owns something. That e-commerce website has its payment integration with SagePay, for example. This is because of the next rule of apostrophe use…

Contractions
If letters are omitted from a word or combination of words, the apostrophe is used to indicate the missing letters. Don’t for “Do Not”, you’re for “You are”. The word “It’s” is short for “it is”.

Don’t use apostrophes with:

Plurals
This would be the “grocer’s apostrophe” – you might have seen this on a menu or noticeboard.

“Pizza’s Apple’s Pasta”. Grammatically, that’s “The pasta belonging to the apple that belongs to the pizza.”

If you’re selling multiple websites, that isn’t the same as trying to advertise a single website’s features.  A plural S is not followed or preceded by an apostrophe unless there is possession indicated as well.

The only case where you might use an apostrophe in a plural is with numerals, acronyms and abbreviations:

Minding your P’s and Q’s (although “Minding your Ps and Qs” is also correct and may be preferred by some sources)
The website was written in the 90′s (again, “written in the 90s” would also be correct)

Grammar and Spelling on the Internet

It may seem old-fashioned to be concerned about spelling and grammar on a web page when many Internet users are now using short forms – like text-speak – online. Just remember your target market – and that your web page is an advertisement for your company. Your readers will form an opinion of your company based on what they read, and what they read needs to represent you.

Using a professional copy writing service can help if you’re not sure you can represent your company in the best possible light.

Hold on just one moment… how much does your client know about CSS – and how long is the site content going to retain the look and feel they’re so pleased with if they’re not confident with HTML?

Clients aren’t coders.

Most of them, anyway – most clients know how to use Microsoft Word, but that might well be the extent of their design knowledge. And, if you’ve worked with Content Management Systems, you know that copying text from a Microsoft Word document into the CMS can cause some unexpected design complications, and can result in accessibility issues, including loss of W3C compliance. Inserting plain text into the editor helps, but what happens to the formatting?

Using inline formatting is certainly an option, and many clients will opt for this. It’s quite easy to highlight a segment of text, apply a font size and colour, then set the text alignment. This has the advantage of being truly WYSIWYG, as all changes will show up exactly as the user wants them to in the CMS editor window. There’s just one small problem.

If your client doesn’t know exactly what font sizes, colours and alignments are used in the content you set up for them – not to mention image spacing, table cell padding and other more advanced settings – it will be very difficult for them to replicate this when they upload their own content. An area of text that looks just about right in the content editor might not look like the rest of the page content when it’s saved and viewed on the front end.

But they can apply CSS styles and classes, right?

Of course, you could supply them with a list of the correct inline style codes or even classes to add for each formatted segment of text… it adds another page or two in the user manual, but it would ensure that they could produce new pages that look like the content you uploaded for them.  Some clients are quite happy to click on that little HTML button and enter an instruction like class=”blah” in the correct part of the page for the content they’re uploading.

But many content managers don’t have any web design experience – they’re working with the content editor on the basis of a “Microsoft Word-like” interface. Looking at the HTML version of a page can be daunting. Those <p> and </tr> and <a class=”sausage” style=”margin: 5px; float: left; clear: both;” href=”/overthere.htm”> tags don’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know that they’re looking at the start of a paragraph, the close of a table row or a styled link to a page.  In that respect, it may not be reasonable to expect your clients to be able to add classes or inline styling.

What’s the solution?

I use a combination of two approaches.

First,  in every CMS user guide that WSI Huddersfield produces, we include any applicable inline styling, particularly where <div> sections have been used to create columns or floating text areas, as standard CMS software doesn’t include an insert-DIV option. This is done by providing a block of code in the user manual with “your text goes here” sections in it.

Secondly, in the site creation process, we use CSS to define the appearance of a number of basic functions on the site, like paragraphs, headings and lists. Once this is done the customer can then use your styles with just a click or two to format their text and retain the same look and feel as the content you have uploaded.

For example, you may need a specific format for a Call-to-Action button. Trying to show a client how to do the Call-to-Action buttons with standard text and inline scripting could be quite problematic, even if you explain to your client exactly where to paste the appropriate styling text. But if you have set up the CSS so that using the Heading 5 option in the CMS will automatically make the text appear as a button with a fixed width, floated right and showing a background image and border, it simplifies things considerably.  A client could then enter their normal text, highlight it, and click “Heading 5″ in the settings.

Style test pages

There is one down side to using the CSS styling in this way – the CMS is no longer quite so WYSIWYG if you’re using external style sheets, which do not show in the editor window. That formatted H5 wouldn’t have the styling applied to it, so it would simply appear as plain bold text in the CMS. This is why creating a Style Test page is important, so that a client can refer to what something looks like on the front end of the site, and click the right option in the CMS. This test page should show:

• Headings 1 –  6
• Standard paragraph text
• Links
• Bullet and numbered lists
• Any other formats applied to standard functions

This way, your client can see what they need to do to replicate the style of pages already on the site. And helping your client to do that will also help you – so that the site you are so pleased about will remain a showcase piece once your clients are maintaining their content themselves.

It’s probably a word you haven’t heard since writing essays in school, when your instructors told you that any evidence of it could result in a failing grade.  But copyright is something to be aware of when creating content for websites and social media campaigns – whether that be asking whether you are legally allowed to use a photograph, a page of text or an idea… or determining whether someone else is entitled to use content you or your clients have created.

Can I use this?

If you created an image, passage of text, video or website for your own personal use, the answer is yes.

According to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, the moment an idea becomes a concrete concept, the creator holds copyright over their intellectual property. No registration or notification is required – although adding a statement of copyright including the copyright holder’s name and the year of creation may be helpful.

However, there are some cases where your own personal copyright may be superseded. For website designers, the most common case is “Work for Hire“. For example, my postings on this blog, although written by a specific individual, are copyrighted to the WSI offices in Holmfirth.

Building websites, depending on the precise terms of the contract signed between client and designer, can be either “work for hire” that becomes the intellectual property of the client or independently contracted work where the rights to the work do not pass to the client. Unless the contract explicitly specifies that the work is being done under a work for hire agreement, it is generally considered that the website code (if not the copy and photographs) remain copyrighted to the website designer.

If the original image, text, code or video was produced by someone else, permission must be obtained from the copyright holder in order to use it, even in a modified form, unless the creator has placed it into the public domain. Publishing content on the internet, contrary to popular belief, does not make it public domain – it is still the intellectual property of its creator.

Another case where copyright becomes particularly important is the use of stock images from online stock image libraries. Although many libraries offer royalty-free usage, most of them state in their licence terms that only the individual or company that has paid to obtain the image can use it – and cannot distribute those images to others for use.  Even an image obtained for a website design on behalf of a client is still limited by the terms of this type of licence – the designer can use it in the process of building the website, but generally cannot send the image to a client for the client to use in promotional materials, for example.

Can they use that?

So, you’ve created original content, and using a tool like www.copyscape.com you’ve discovered that it’s been duplicated somewhere without your knowledge.

Unless a number of very specific conditions are met, your content cannot be published online without your permission. These conditions are known as “Fair Use” and include situations like:

• Excerpts quoted for the purposes of news reporting
• Educational uses including research and private study
• Excerpts used for criticism or review of the work in question

What can you do if you find out that duplication of your content without permission and outside the fair use specifications has occurred?

The first port of call can be to contact the person who has used your content without permission. In most cases people are unaware of copyright restrictions online – and are quite happy to remove your content and/or give you credit for the work.*

If this fails, pursuing the issue with the site’s hosting service may have positive results without resorting to potentially expensive and time-consuming legal wrangling.*

Anti Plagiarism Resources

The following resources may be useful to any designer or site owner who wishes to learn more about intellectual property – and specifically intellectual property online:

http://www.copyrightservice.co.uk/

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/

* Disclaimer: This blog post is for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for legal advice. If your content has been republished without permission – or  you are unsure whether you are entitled to use content – we recommend that you contact a qualified solicitor for legal advice in your specific situation.

Although Microsoft is working to patch this,  the governments of Germany and France have recommended that users switch to an alternative browser and at the minimum to ensure that they are using the most up-to-date version of the browser possible.

Have you updated your browser recently?

Oddly enough, I stopped using Internet Explorer as my primary browser a couple of months back. As a web content manager, I found that it has been more reliable testing website code and layouts using Google Chrome or Firefox – if the style syntax isn’t quite right, those two browsers will show me that it’s wrong. They also have handy tools to check the sections of code and see what styles are being applied to each part of the page.

In my experience, Internet Explorer will let a designer “fudge” the code a bit – and although a site might look fine in that version of Internet Explorer, the presentation in older versions and in other browsers can be completely different.

So, although I do take the security risks that have been revealed in Internet Explorer seriously – and would recommend that all browsers are upgraded to the most recent versions, if you don’t want to try a different browser – my reason for making the switch is simpler.

I want to make sure I’m producing standards-compliant code, and alternate browsers make it much easier to do that.

Using CSS 2 there are ways you can mimic the look and feel of some of the new functionalities in CSS 3, so that even older browsers can see your content presented in similar ways. This particular article will discuss one of the new CSS 3 functions and how to fake it using CSS 2.

Multi-Column Layouts

There are two ways to create a multi-column layout using CSS 2. However, each of them has advantages and disadvantages. Depending on the content to display, you may find that one technique will do what you need better than the other.

Using Multiple DIVs for Column Layout

This can be an elegant solution, providing the ability to display columns of fixed width and height containing freely entered text. From a content management point of view,  it does require a little bit of knowledge of HTML.  This method can result in a lot of content-editor tweaking to ensure that the content required does display neatly within the given columnar DIV.

I would use this technique in places where it is essential to present content in separate paragraphs, or where images might be part of the column contents.

The example CSS code might be something as simple as this:

.column {width: 250px; height: 400px; padding: 10px; float: left; margin: 10px;}

And in the content editor:

<div class=”column”>Content</div><div class=”column”>Content column 2</div>

Using Lists for Column Layout

This solution works well for people uploading content who aren’t as familiar with HTML. If I were working on a project with a keen client who wishes to update and maintain their own website, this might be the choice I’d use for a columnar layout – because it can be done without having to edit HTML at all, as long as the default list style is set to display in columns.  Of course, this would involve knowing the client’s content and whether they are likely to need bulleted / numbered lists in their content as well.

The code I might use to display a list as a series of columns is as follows:

ol { list-style : none;  width: 410px;  height: 400px;  padding: 0px; margin: 10px; }

This creates an ordered list of a fixed width and height, with no “bullet”  number at the start of it.

ol li{ margin-left: 10px; padding-left:  0px;  padding-bottom :  10px;  width :  150px;  float :  left; }

This creates fixed-width ordered list lines, and hitting “enter” will create a new column.  Of course, this might require the use of <br /><br /> (shift-enter in most content editors) to imitate a paragraph break within a single column.

Both of these methods are not without their drawbacks,  particularly in terms of  the height of each section  - it can be difficult to break in the middle of a line and present columns of equal height – but until browsers catch up with CSS 3, this may be an acceptable work-around.  If you have alternative methods to creating columns in CSS 2 please do feel free to share in the comments below.

Certain characters should not be used as plain text in HTML markup but should instead be represented by their respective HTML entities in order to preserve their meanings. When writing HTML this is a straightforward process – you type the HTML entity rather than the special character. But what happens when you have some plain text containing these characters (out of a database, for example) that you need to display? PHP has a function that will take a string and convert special characters to their HTML entities for you.

What are special characters?

Some characters have special significance in HTML and in order to preserve their meanings they must be represented by HTML entities. One of the most common examples of this is the ampersand (&).

Why convert special characters to HTML entities?

Ampersands are used in HTML to begin an entity reference, and should not therefore be used as punctuation in standard text. Rather, ampersands should be converted to their HTML entity – & – so that HTML interpreters (such as web browsers) are aware that they are not preceeding an entity reference.

When should you convert special characters to their HTML entities?

Special characters should always be converted to HTML entities whenever you need to preserve their meanings.

Using the ampersand as an example again, if you leave it unconverted in HTML markup as a punctuation symbol an HTML interpreter will expect that you are actually beginning an entity reference and could parse your document incorrectly.

Another example is the double quotation mark – " – (commonly referred to as “double quotes”). Double quotes are used in HTML markup to enclose attribute values amongst other things. Therefore if your value includes a double quote that is not converted to its HTML entity ("), the HTML interpreter will assume that this denotes the end of the value.

How to convert special characters to HTML entities

PHP has a function called htmlspecialchars() that takes a string and returns the string with special characters converted to HTML entities. Using htmlspecialchars() the following translations are performed:

• '&' (ampersand) becomes '&'
• '"' (double quote) becomes '"' when ENT_NOQUOTES is not set.
• ''' (single quote) becomes ''' only when ENT_QUOTES is set.
• '<' (less than) becomes '<'
• '>' (greater than) becomes '>'

This is not a complete list of HTML character entities, just the most useful for everyday web programming.

You might use htmlspecialchars() in a similar way to this:

<input type="text" name="anything" value="<?php echo htmlspecialchars($row['value']); ?>" />

If the text that you are displaying contains any special characters such as ampersands or double quotes they will be converted to HTML entities and will not invalidate or otherwise affect your HTML code.

What about other special characters?

As explained previously, htmlspecialchars() only converts the characters listed into their HTML entities. If you want to perform full entity translation, PHP also has the htmlentities() function, which will convert all applicable characters to HTML entities.

Conclusion

You should always use HTML entities if you want to preserve the meaning of special characters. If you’re writing HTML yourself you should code these into your markup. If you’re inserting text dynamically, simply run it through PHP’s htmlspecialchars() function.

• Writing quality, optimised content can be time-consuming.
• Experts on the subject aren’t always expert writers.
• Professional copy writers may not suit a project with a tight budget.

But I have recently discovered a couple of tricks that might make the content process just a little bit easier.

Content Outlines and Templates

One solution to writer’s block when it comes to client content is to produce a content outline – a template for each major page on the site. If a Site Map has already been worked out, use this to set up your template – and create an outline of each page.

I recently built a content outline that asked the following sorts of questions:

• How would you write your company philosophy in a single line?
• What are the five questions you want your customers to ask about your business? Please give me the five answers, as two sentences each.
• What are two services you offer that you don’t think your customers know about yet?
• Please list ten things your customers need to know about this product. These will be shown as bullet points next to the large photograph.

Don’t forget to include relevant examples in your content template – that makes it even easier for someone who isn’t a writer to see what sort of information you’re looking for.  This goes for graphics too – if you are going to use images to enhance the text, explain what sort of images you believe will improve the pages you create.

Design With Text in Mind

Every concept draft gets hit with it.  In the place where editable content will go, the designer will plug in a block of “Lorem Ipsum” text, often justified, to show how the text will look on the page.

Why not go further and show the design with content formatting?

Most actual content won’t be justified blocks of difficult-to-scan text. Usability and accessibility experts recommend creating content that can be skimmed through – and highlighting the important points. Even if you’re using Lorem Ipsum to create a placeholder on a concept sheet, there’s no reason not to show that text in the way content might be presented on the live site.

Create headings, use bullet points and show emphasis on your placeholder text. It might just give you some ideas on how to fill that space with real text, too.

Help us to build your dream CMS! We’re working on our own system and we’d like to make it available for all of you to offer to your clients. What do you love or hate about existing systems? What’s the one feature that you’ve always wanted? Let us know and we’ll do our best to make it happen.<!–more–>

Why not use an existing CMS?

Using an off-the-shelf CMS has many advantages; they usually allow you to deploy a site quickly at low cost. Many of them also have an active development community, meaning you have access to custom “modules” and additional functionality. The trade-off is that all of this comes at the expense of flexibility and usability. You no longer have the same level of control over your site’s processes and appearance as you would with a bespoke build.

Our aim is to build a system which allows us to create a bespoke quality site, with the cost and delivery time of an off-the-shelf product.

Building Our Own CMS In-House

Our in-house designers and developers created our first system from the ground up about 18 months ago. It was basic but was built on the principles of speed, security and simplicity for the user. These fundamentals have been paramount since then as we’ve built in features and slowly increased the systems capabilities.

When we make the system available to other ICs we’re hoping to have the following features available as standard:

• Simple page management for single or multi nav sites
• Flawless SEO friendly URLs
• Advanced visitor reporting/statistics built into the back-office
• A customisable live feed of activity on your site
• News, event, user, banner and bulk email management
• Automatic HTML and XML sitemap generation

We’ve spent a lot of time ensuring that the user interface for the back-office is as clean and easy to use as possible. Here’s a quick preview of the current build:

We’re going to continue getting our system ready and want it to be as useful for you as it has been for us. Tell us what you like or dislike the most about the systems you are using at the moment. Tell us what your dream feature would be. What’s the one thing that your last client asked for that you weren’t able to deliver?

We want to hear it all no matter how big or small the feature! Leave a comment below or email dan@wsi-ebizsolutions.biz directly.