Business Website Tip of the Week: How to Make Good Content Even Better

The fact that your business website's copy is good doesn't guarantee that it will be read. Your copy may be useful, effective, and persuasive when read from start to finish, but it may not be living up to its potential if it doesn't respect a basic web truth:

For the most part, when reviewing information on the web, people do not read. They skim.

As much as you may love those long, detail-rich paragraphs expounding the wonders of your many qualifications and accomplishments, most people have neither the time nor patience to read through them.

To turn your good text into great text that allows people to first skim through your content, simply chunk it up. Break large paragraphs into smaller, bite-sized portions of content. Use headlines above areas of text to let your visitors know what that text focuses on. Take those long lists of accreditations, clients, or products and arrange them in easy-to-skim-through bulleted lists.

Your site's visitors can't be educated or influenced by all that text you wrote if they never read it. So consider setting aside a small bit of time to review your site's copy and, if it's a bit on the wordy side, chunk it up to increase the likelihood of it being read by your site's visitors.

Local Technology Alert of the Week! Summit Telecom is here!

Sound the trumpets! Clang the bells! Let it be known to all Summit County residents that we have a local telephone company right here in Breckenridge! Summit Telecom offers three great plans for you to choose from, they donate $1 from each monthly bill to the National Forest Foundation to help replant Summit County forests, and, best of all, all their plans include free long distance! I don't think it gets much better than that. In fact, most companies and businesses that switch to Summit Telecom find they save close to 40 percent on their phone bills.

In 2002, my company began using Qwest for its phone service. Our monthly phone bills typically fell within the $50 to $60 range — and this did not include long distance service. We've since switched to Summit Telecom and, not only do we feel great about supporting a local business, our monthly phone service now costs $39.95 per month — and that includes national long distance service!

Sign up or learn more today. Call Summit Telecom at (970)

776-5882 or visit their website: www.DialSummit.com.

Grab Bag: Your Four Links of the Week

1. http://tinyurl.com/yz9fk9s — Allow this YouTube video

to introduce you to the future of computer mice.

2. www.LetterMeLater.com — Send out e-mails to anyone you wish — “with the ability to have them sent at any future date and time you choose.” Features include a LetterMeLater widget, the ability to send recurring emails, the ability to send scheduled text messages to cell phones, and a function for importing your contacts and creating grouped mailing lists.

3. http://tinyurl.com/ygdjo6t — Oh how I wish more Twitter users would read this blog post, written by Denver copywriter Erika Napoletano, entitled “How to be annoying on Twitter in 3 easy steps.”

4. http://tinyurl.com/6mmnu3 — Are you mucking up your website's analytics without knowing it? If you Google Analytics users haven't filtered out yourself and your coworkers, you very well might be skewing your site's statistics. Would you really feel so proud about your 400 website visits last week if 250 of those visits were actually you and your office pals — because you all have your site set as your homepage? Visit this link to learn how you can easily filter yourself and others out of your Google Analytics tracking.

5. http://tinyurl.com/yed9xbs — Hang your clothes, save the world? Sounds a bit easier than having to save the cheerleader.

eRin pheiL is the primary creative force behind timeforcake (www.timeforcake.com), a web design and development studio in Frisco. She can be reached via email at erin@timeforcake.com.