Depending on who you ask, you get told two very different content definitions. Worse even they are often just implicitly used so that
professionals act as if the content definition is self-evident. One of the two is very wrong for most use cases.
That’s why most sites fail with their content. Their owners are misunderstanding content from the very beginning.
What is a horse?
My mother is a linguist from Poland. One of her hobbies is to find out where words originated from and how they have been defined in the past. For example, in one of the oldest Polish dictionaries there is no definition of the Polish word for “horse”. Instead of an explanation, the dictionary says the following:
“how a horse looks like everybody can see”.
As you can imagine, the dictionary has been published at a time when horses were so common that nobody seemingly needed an explanation. Carriages were both widely used in cities and the countryside.
Apparently most people today think “how content looks like everybody can see”. Why explaining something so obvious? It’s not just that there are numerous kinds of horses. Some animals that look like horses may not be horses at all. Think zebras.
What is the content of an empty bottle?
I’m afraid I stretched the analogy a bit. Let’s return to content. Sadly it’s more abstract than horses so we need to visualize it a bit. For my consulting clients, I prefer to use the bottle metaphor. I ask them the following question: what’s the content?
Is content what is written outside on the bottle label, the ingredients list maybe? Or is it the liquid inside you can drink?
Some people still don’t get it at that point. They would put pieces of paper explaining the lemonade inside and be perfectly certain that it’s the content. For many people anything that is on a website is its content. Any text or images is content according to that most basic definition.
The hard work of dealing with “everything is content” clients
As you can imagine such “everything is content” clients are hard to work with. They tend to come from e-commerce where they have a large inventory of products. Their online store is automatically filled with the products from the database.
No editors are involved. The product descriptions – in case there are any – stem from the manufacturers themselves and are the same dozens of other online stores show us. Yet, when it comes to valuable content, their sites are empty.
The Terms of Service are probably the longest piece of text on the whole site.
Another very common kind of client is the one who misunderstands a content-rich site is the stylish person. Someone who has paid a lot for a “good looking” design. I know that design is not about looks but such a person doesn’t in many cases.
When confronted with the need to add content to their site they will say something like: OK, let’s add some small type text to the footer for the SEO. At that point I already wonder whether I shall laugh or cry.
Lorem Ipsum is for dummies!
What these two aberrations have in common? Yes, sometimes the same person is supporting both above approaches to content: anything on a site is content and squeezing more of that into the footer section is optimization, usually at the end of the website redesign when everything else has already been finished.
Designers are often among the “let’s put some content into the footer for SEO” group.
They have designed with Lorem Ipsum dummy text until then and didn’t notice that in real life the actual content needed to be 10 times longer than the dummy text or at least visible from the start. Designing a site without designing its content is nonsense.
Who would sell empty bottles?
There is not even an equivalent to this in real life. Nobody would sell empty bottles and claim that the content is the stuff written on paper in front. The label is not the content. Neither is the brand nor the list of ingredients. The logo isn’t content.
Content is something that has value of its own.
In the case of a bottle, it’s the liquid inside you can drink. Treating your website like a bottle means that you need to pour some useful content into it in order to create a purpose for that site beyond pointing towards your real life business or linking elsewhere.
Let’s find some middle-ground
Of course the world is not all black and white. There are some cases where we witness middle-ground. Portfolio sites of designers are a good example. In most cases the “content” consists of show off pieces of their work.
Are images of products, screenshots of websites, logos or other graphics content?
They are content for some, namely potential clients of designers. For all others, they equal useless self-promotion. They have no value for the average Internet user unless that person is interested in design like me. In some instances, the same thing can be content on one site while it’s part of the label on other sites.
Content and audience are two sides of the same coin
Depending on what’s inside the bottle, you already define your preferred audience (as we don’t target anyone here with a gun). The bottle of beer won’t be of any use for the young mother who wants to feed a baby while the dirty old man from around the corner will probably ignore the plastic milk bottle. Thus
the definition of content is closely tied to the definition of the audience.
You have to define your audience first to be able to provide the right content for it. Now that we speak of design: the content comes first and the designer has to provide a vessel or literally container for it, not the other way around.
The content is contained in the container
Now that we know that our audience consists predominantly of sleepy office workers, we can define both the content and the container. How does the bottle need to be like in order to be noticed as containing what our preferred audience seeks ? While I gave up both milk and caffeine a few years back, I still feel the pain of burnt out office drones.
Here in Germany we have a huge trend of caffeinated mate tea drunk cold as a kind of lemonade. It contains more caffeine than Cola as far as I know, is healthier and has less health side effects than energy drinks. So while young people around 20 who don’t work yet and want to dance all night might prefer energy drinks using striking colors, most mate tea is drunk by people aged – a wild guess – from 20 to 30.
The content is usually more or less transparent or slightly yellow. It has some health benefits coffee hasn’t but sadly also drawbacks and it’s popular among hip young professionals. For a few years I was really unable to work without a mate tea bottle on my table. In the US, it’s mostly called Yerba Mate I think. There are several brands of cold lemonade mate tea around here and all of them look similar to Yerba Mate. They are more or less yellow and transparent just like the drink itself.
Different contents different bottles
Why do I write so much about bottles and drinks? Am I thirsty? It’s not just that they are less abstract. It’s easier to grasp the concept of how content influences the container. Here in Germany at least you can spot a beer bottle, a cola can, an energy drink can, etc. from afar just by its form and colors.
There are some exceptions, for example, malt beer without alcohol or “child beer” as the Germans say is sold in bottles looking almost exactly like beer bottles. I remember how people looked down at me in the supermarket when I bought some malt beer during office hours. Their eyes were telling whole stories like “this poor wretch, must be depressed for drinking alcohol at that time already, or is he just a bum”?
Similarly, the design of a website is highly dependent on its content. When you apply the wrong content definition from the start, your site design will be misleading or at least not working properly from the start either. Even in case when you wake up and start applying the valuable content definition, you may end up being disappointed with your “content marketing” results as long as your site design doesn’t reflect the nature of the content and its audience.
Photo Credit: (CC BY 2.0) Creative Commons image by Barbara Eckstein
