Your Online Presence > Strategy & Development

Getting a Website - Planning Your Content

By Lasa Information Systems Team

Your strategy determines what content you should include in your site. You may find it useful to have a "brainstorming" session of what content you could include. This article gives some pointers to start you off.

Text

Many sites begin their development by putting existing publications online. Remember that you need to format texts differently from paper versions when you publish them on the web. Most screens hold far less text than a sheet of paper, and users generally prefer to read only short documents on screen – they print off longer documents and read them on paper. So keep online texts short, dividing up longer documents if necessary – don’t force users to scroll down through very long documents.

A Discussion Forum

You can include areas in your site where users can discuss issues. For examples of this, see Lasa’s Rightsnet site. You can have one forum for all discussions, or you can set up forums for different topics.

Databases

You may have developed a database which would be of use to your clients. It might include details of other organisations which could be useful to them, for example, or information about issues which affect them. You could publish the database on your website, presented in a way that makes it easy to use for people who don’t understand how databases work.

See the knowledgebase article Online databases an alternative vision for examples of what's possible.

Frequently Asked Questions

Many sites include an FAQ, or answers to a list of Frequently Asked Questions. If you find yourself answering the same questions regularly, this might be of use to your site’s users.

Mailing Lists

You could ask users for their email address – this could be automatically added to an electronic mailing list for distributing information such as a newsletter. If an urgent issue comes up, you could contact everyone on the list immediately.

Enquiries, Bookings and Sales

Users could enter their details on your site to request printed materials to be posted to them, or to subscribe to a newsletter. This can be simple to set up – the details which your users enter are sent to you by email in a standardised format. If you organise events like conferences or training courses, you could set up a more complex system so that users could book online – details they enter on the web site would be automatically transferred to a database. You can even set up systems to sell goods or services, though you would need expert help with this – users enter their credit or debit card details, their card is validated, and the money is transferred from their account to yours.

Feedback

Be sure to include a way that people can contact you about your site – which bits they do or don’t like, what’s easy or hard to use – and about your service. You could just include your email address, or you can ask users for more detailed information.

Site Search

Many sites include a Search facility – useful for users who know or suspect that some information is on the site, but who can’t find exactly where.

This page is one part of a longer document about getting a website. If you want to read through the whole thing, you'll want to start with the Introduction.

If you are reading through all the parts of this document, the next part is Do It Yourself Or Get a Website Developer?