Put yourself in your reader's shoes.

byMaddy55

2.6K followers

9 years ago

Hello fellow WA clubbers :) My first blog here. I am not new to writing articles, and this is not my first website. I made my first with Homestead, a horribly outdated program, then last year I made a new website with Weebly, that one was easy and a lot of fun. This year, as of a week and a half ago, I wound up here and low and behold, I am making my first WordPress website for a new business (hopefully). Gosh I have already learned so much, and I have been dreaming at night about rankings, keywords and widgets...I am not kidding! I am also an avid internet browser and an online shopper so I have seen a LOT of website blogs and online stores. What I want to talk about is quality of website construction.

I know Kyle states that one does not have to be able to write like a professor to create good content for a website.... however, in my browsing and shopping on the Internet, I have seen a lot of poor quality sites alongside really nicely done sites! I have often LEFT an on line store that is poorly constructed and done business with another much more polished on line store! Likewise, when I encounter a Blog or informational site that is ripe with miss spelled words, sentences with no endings, articles that are one looonngg paragraph, or sentences that just plain don't make sense, I leave that website until I find another one that is well done. I am also an avid reader of books in general, and when I am reading a book that has too many typos, it distracts me from the story.

Yes, I realize not everyone has the ability of being able to write well. My advice is to find someone who has that ability (friend, family or ?) to edit your work before you publish it. For example, I am terrible at Math, so I leave that to my Husband who has 40 years experience in accounting. My strengths are in being able to communicate via writing( or verbally), often my family (and some friends) have come to me for advice on something they wrote and are not sure about.

Another reason I often leave a site is because the theme framework is clumsy and difficult to navigate. My first website was horribly clumsy and would sometimes crash for no reason. As I remember, there was only one theme! The point of this Blog post is to point out how important it is to see your website from your reader's point of view. Look at the best Blogs and Stores, compare them, put yourself in a reviewer or shopper position (even if you don't buy anything), and ask yourself... what attracts you to keep reading? What attracts you to keep turning the pages? Also what turns you off about the Blog or Store? I find when I have found a website that is really well done and engaging, I am more likely to Bookmark it.

I have not finished my website here yet, I am not happy with the 2 themes that I have tried. WordPress has a much higher learning curve than Weebly but the millions of people that use WordPress must be onto something, so here I am. During my search today, to find and understand WordPress terminology (and other things about WordPress), I found the following site that was helpful to me, maybe to you too... www.tipsandtricks-hq.co.