First steps in getting your content ready for your website

Let’s assume you and I are going to work together to produce a website for you. This site might have any of several important purposes, but regardless of its purpose it’s most likely that you will place there some written material that you yourself have produced. In many cases this will be material you’re already using in your practice.

Let’s ignore for now the question of how involved you’ll be in managing this site after it’s launched – editing pages, adding pages, removing pages, and so on. You may already know the answer – or not. It really doesn’t matter right now.

Instead, we want to focus on just two things, both of them simple and straightforward:

1. Identifying and listing potential site content.
2. Organizing your content topically, so that you can start thinking about how to present it to your site’s visitors.

You will be surprised and pleased with how useful it will for you to accomplish just these two things. It will lead you directly into the next part of site development – with a sense of having the heart of your site well in hand.

Let’s pause a moment to clarify what I mean by “site content.” My expectation is that you have some already in good condition, as well as some that’s merely imagined, and also some which may be somewhere between these two extremes. In any case, your content – the “stuff” people are going to come to your site to see and read – is at this point an amorphous mass which isn’t yet in any shape to put on a website. Completely transforming this situation is the immediate task at hand.

Identifying and listing potential site content

You need first of all to collect all potential site content into a single list. As you construct your list, pay no attention to list item order. It doesn’t matter, as you will soon see. Making the list itself DOES matter, though, so get started the moment you start thinking of material you might put on your site. You can work on your list over several days. That’s often a rather comfortable way to do it.

Identifying and listing content already written

Begin by listing everything which comes immediately to your mind. This is a “brainstorming” list, so if in doubt put it on the list. We’ll weed the garden later.

Next, start digging around in any place you might have put potential material, including various computer directories or “folders”. If you don’t already have it installed on your computer, you might want to investigate the Google Desktop Indexer (see my note¹ on this, below), because it can make the task of locating all potential material on your computer much easier.

Include everything you KNOW you want on the site plus anything you think is “potential” material. If you don’t have much, then include the “possible” material as well. The “screening” question you should probably use for all such material is simply this:

Could it reasonably be useful to a client of mine (prospective, present, or past), or to a referral source, or to a member of the lay public?

You might also want to include materials of specific interest to professionals in the human services (I have a special section for such folks on my own professional website).

Here’s what your list might include:

• formal articles you’ve written for any publication.
• handouts you’ve prepared for use with your clients (for example, you might have written up a relaxation procedure for them – why not put it on you site, so they can download a copy if they lose the one you gave them?).
• handouts or other material you’ve prepared for workshops and trainings, which you’re willing to share outside of these settings.
• ANY useful material you’ve written in emails to clients. (That’s right – you should “mine” this material, if you put any real content in your emails.)
• Any other material you’ve written anywhere at any time which might have clinical utility, or illustrate your thinking, or be of value to any type of site visitor you anticipate serving.

Here’s what your list might look like at this point – just a collection of material which you easily thought of or found:

Also list content material you want to write soon

Most of us have ideas for content – handouts, short statements on something, short document (or long) or other sorts – which we have well in hand in our minds, and which we could have on paper fairly quickly with only modest effort. THESE sorts of things are what we want to “capture” for your list next.

Add this material to the list you’ve already started, using its working or prospective title. So, for example, you might put on your list:

• Brief handouts you know your clients could use, if you could just find a little time and motivation to produce them (having a website to fill can be a great motivator).
• Supplemental handouts you thought of in any presentation you’ve done recently – material you didn’t have but wished at the time you did.
• Summaries of current news content which site visitors might find useful. For example, I’ve been thinking of writing a 300-500 word summary of what we now know about seasonal affective disorder and its management, something of which many laypeople have a vague but inadequate awareness.
• Summaries of important professional documents you’ve read, but which laypeople are not likely to encounter. For example, there are sections of the Report of the Surgeon General on Mental Health which could very handily be summarized in this manner.

Special request: If you’re working through these two lists, to produce your list of possible website content, and you discover a category of material which is NOT on either of the two lists above but ought to be, please contact me – you’d be helping other people, AND you’d be doing me a significant favor. Thank you, in advance!

Note the location of each list item

Identify WHERE the content you’ve just listed can be found, while it’s still fresh in your mind. This is especially an issue with content which “lives” on your computer. Note locations BY the items on your list – for example, in parentheses.

So, now your imaginary list might look like this:

Organizing your content topically

Now comes the fun part of this task. This body of material you’ve collected might be thought of in a variety of ways, and each way of thinking could well represent the mind set of a different person visiting your site. By anticipating all this, you make access to the content in your site much easier for visitors. They’ll stay longer, and leave happier.

Number the list

Each item on your list needs to have a unique label or identifier. A number works great, so simply number each item on your list. Any number will do, but each must be unique – used only once, to state the obvious. The number now become a “handle” for the list item, as you’ll soon see.

Extract topics from each item on the list

Conceptually, each item on your list is about a limited number of topics. For example, let’s take the first item on our fictional list – a piece you might have written for your local high school PTA newsletter: “Family-focused adolescent drug use prevention strategies”. It has some fairly obvious topics suggested by the title. But suppose you also take up in this little piece the idea of managing behavior by using contingencies – there’s another topic (or two) also.

So, here’s how this item on the list might look, with its number, its location noted, and with its topics extracted:

Be assured that different people might come up with different topics. Don’t worry about that. Aim simply for a decent, and brief, topic list, and then move on to the next item in your list. Having any topics at all is considerably better than having none, in which case the site visitor has to try to figure things out for themselves.

Try to reuse topics, rather than coming up with really unique topics. By assigning the topics, you’re actually sorting each item into a small number of categories. It won’t be helpful to have a large number of categories, each with only a few items in it. A small number will make more sense to site visitors.

SPECIAL NOTE – about breaking list items into smaller pieces

Reading on the Internet is different from reading print material, research has discovered. People are less tolerant of long documents, on the Internet, and respond better to small chunks of content broken up with numerous headings, and with short (2-4 sentences) paragraphs.

What this means is that if you can break a larger piece into a smaller piece you will increase substantially the chances that someone will actually READ the material. When you extract topics from each of your items, you may easily see that some items need to be broken into smaller pieces. On the list, you can do this immediately, conceptually, and then do the actual separation of the content latter. You should then assign topics to each piece, as they’re going to be stand alone as items on your site.

PAYOFF: Compile your topic lists

This is the climax of this whole exercise. For this task, you’ll need some 3×5 or larger filing cards, or some small paper slips.

Work though each item on your list, one at a time. Put each topic you find on a separate card. Also put on the card the identifying number of the item which has this topic assigned to it. That’s all. This will be rather quick work.

When you reach the end of the list, you’ll have a set of cards, each of which lists the articles which take up the topic on the card. From this, you can then type up a set of topics, with lists or articles under each topic. This presents your content to site visitors in a way which makes it very easy for them to browse topics and find the material which most interests them. They’ll appreciate the work you’ve done for them, and if you’re tracking visitor access to your site you’ll appreciate that visitors seem to be access more pages, for longer periods of time.

You should understand a couple of things, when making these topic list:

1. Obviously a single article or document can appear on multiple lists. It’s a good thing when this happens, for you’re getting more use out of your content.
2. When you present these topic groups on your site, you’ll be presenting a list of links, NOT separate physical groups of documents. Each document will actually appear only once on your site, but can be approached or viewed from multiple angles. A powerful idea, is it not? Also, a very sensible idea, and the whole point of the work you’ve done here.

Conceptual re-analysis of your list content

Now that you have a better-than-ever idea of what your real website content will likely be, you need to think about how this content set relates to your site objectives. For example, just because you have more content chunks about kids than about adults doesn’t mean that that’s the emphasis you want your site to have. YOU decide such things, and your content follows after you.

The content on your site needs to work for you. It can say things like “I can work knowledgeably with couples in distress” or “I know how to facilitate graceful death” or “I can turn depressed people around”, and so on. Decide what statements you want to make, then organize presentation of your content around these statements.

The point: each of these general statements should be a major section of your website, and in each section you will present some of your content. (You’ll also be able to see, at this point, if some of your content really doesn’t belong on your site, in which case it needs to be gently “retired” from further consideration.)

First draft of site structure

You’re finally ready, now, to write up a brief outline of your site structure as you believe it needs to be. This conceptual organization then needs to be run past your marketing guru (which may simply be a different part of your own mind, or it may be a marketing-savvy colleague), and then your website construction guru. And then…it’s finally time to start building your website!

Catch up work: producing the content

When you’ve come down from your conceptual cloud, it’s time to be a writer for a while. You probably have items on your list which are merely ideas, as well as some which are fragments of what was originally a larger piece. These items need some attention for you, so put on your writer’s hat and go to work. This is important work, so give it adequate time and effort. Only real content can go onto your site, and it needs to be of decent quality. But you have a pretty good idea where you’re going, now, so let the wind fill your sails and move on out!

Note

¹ This Google Desktop indexer is FREE software which I cannot imagine working with. Once you download and install it, you should set it to run overnight, or while you’re out shopping. In a few hours, it will have made a searchable index of everything important on your computer. It then will effortlessly keep this index updated, working silently in the background while you do other work on your computer. You no longer have to remember where anything is – because this index can find it. As I said, it’s a lifesaver, and a time saver, too.