.....You're standing on a stage. You feel your heart pound as Jay introduces you and the band begins to play. You take a deep breath and step forward to your mark. As the stage lights come up you can just barely make out the tally light on camera 1 in your peripheral vision. The sound of music and applause swirls around your ears, then slowly dies as you stare into a sea of smiling, expectant faces. Now.....what was it that you wanted to say?.....

While you'll probably never have to perform in front of a network television audience, imagining the experience can help you to develop a useful way to think about your Web site. Like a network television performer, you are going to have to attract and hold the attention of an audience for a fairly long time if your site is going to be successful.

     In this section we're going to take you through the process that we use to develop the content for a site. We're going to ask you some questions that we would ask you if you were our client. We think that the answers will help you to make your site more useful and interesting to your audience. We're going to show you some of the exercises that we use to develop copy for the site. While there are no hard and fast rules for thinking this through, there are a few tried and true techniques that can help get you started. Let's begin with a primary question....

What's the Big Idea?
What is it that you want your Web site to do? While at first the answer may seem obvious, the deeper answers to this same question can become important in developing the Focus for your site. For instance, if I asked you for the primary reason that you wanted to develop a Web site, your first answer may sound something like this....

...."I want to sell/give away my product/services/information/point of view".

     Sounds noble, but there's not much there that I didn't already know. OK, now let's assume that I'm going to keep asking you the same question over and over (If you've ever played the game of WHY? with your kids, you know how this goes. ) until I get you to give me a little more detail. I think you'll discover that a clear agenda will start to appear, which may look something like this:

...."I want to sell/give away my product/services/information/point of view"

...."I want the public to know what's going on."

...."I want the government to stop wasting my tax money:

...."I want people to write to Congress and tell them to stop giving the Pentagon three billion dollars a year to research inflatable cannons."

     Now we're getting somewhere. Once the real deal is out on the table, we have a clear place to start the process of building content.

     Take a few minutes to write down the goals for your Web site. Once you have what seems like a fairly complete list, arrange the elements by order of importance. See if you can think of a "hook" for your goals, a "hub" thought or principle around which your goals can circle. This will later serve as an organizing element.

     Assuming that we now have a fairly complete list of preliminary goals, we're ready to move on to the next step........

Organizing Your Thoughts
We're going to expand on your list of goals in order to discover what kind of specific information you want to include on your site. Using each item on your goal list as a header, make another series of lists or note cards detailing the specific points that you want to make in each section. You'll notice that all of this information is beginning to form an OUTLINE, although the elements will probably still be out of order. Keep shuffling the elements until you're confident that the ideas that you want to include flow smoothly from one to the next. If you've done a lot of writing, you may already be familiar with a similar way of working. Taking the time to develop a lucid outline is going to be one of the most important steps in producing your site because it's going to provide you with a framework for your navigational interface. I know that all this ordering may seem a tad anal, but trust me. If you don't make these decisions now, not only will your copy seem disjointed, you'll be pulling your hair out later when it comes time to design the navigation elements. This step will also help to give you a realistic idea of how much it's going to cost to develop your site.

     Eventually, you'll come to a place where you feel comfortable with the structure that you've created. You've met your goals. You've made all the individual points that you wanted to make. Maybe you've finished with a call to action, or maybe you've asked for the sale. Now that you have a map, you're ready to begin filling in the details...........

Painting in the World of Words
The following is a real excerpt from the user's manual of a popular piece of software, written by one of the world's largest software developers. In order to protect the innocent, the actual software company responsible for this shall remain brainless......

......If you wish to use names that refer to objects relative to the objects containing the names, change the references of the objects to relative object references. Note, however, that the objects referred to change when a formula is moved or copied.......

     Did you understand that? Neither did I. A particularly vicious friend of mine speculated that it was probably written by the person who was responsible for selling the company's tech support services to new users.

This brings us to an important point. When writing copy, it's going to be vital that you develop and maintain a mental picture of your audience. Who are you writing for? How much education do they have? How familiar are they with the subject that you're presenting? Holding this information in your mind is going to help you to decide what to include as content. While you may have two Ph.Ds and be able to hum whole verses about the effects of saturated arithmetic and massive parallelism on video conferencing compression schemes, your education isn't necessarily going to help you communicate your ideas to others. In fact, your familiarity with a subject may actually blind you to the plight of your audience, who may not share your level of understanding. Usually, after about two paragraphs worth of struggling to understand what you're trying to say, they'll be on their way back to Google in search of something more "interesting". Too bad, because you have a really nice product.

     Let's talk for a minute about another key aspect of developing content ...voice. We all know the importance of tailoring the voice of our message to the medium. Let's start with a message on, say, TV. Maybe someone in your audience is watching Will & Grace. He's home. He's relaxed. Laughing. Receptive. Susceptible. Disbelief has been suspended. During the breaks, the advertisers are spending fortunes to take advantage of the cognitive inertia created by the programming. Maybe by the time the show is over our guy is really starting to think that his life would be complete if he could just get that new car, or change beers.

Now fast forward to the next day. That same, easy going guy now has a serious question. His mood has changed. He's looking for something on the Web. Maybe his job or his health or his stock portfolio is riding on the answer. This is not about entertainment. He's out there listening for authentic information. The Web is, as they say, a conversation, and he's joined it...joined the millions of real human voices in news and discussion groups, chat rooms, e-mail circles, and sites that rate products and services. They've bought your products, they've tried your services, and now they're talking... about you. Maybe the very same guy who makes your widgets during the day talks about them at night on the net . The market has a voice, and you don't need a research team to hear it.

Our guy goes to a corporate site hoping for dialog to go with the sell, but instead finds only buzzwords, adverbabble, fatuous self praise ...the anti-conversation. Compared to the spontaneous, lively, real person-to-person stuff going on in the net market he just left, the warmed over brand of sleek, sanitized happytalk that works just fine on TV suddenly sounds hollow, smells fishy. He can't find any sign of an authentic human voice. He's arrived, but there's nobody home. He moves on.

     Our customers are out there on the Web. They want us to succeed. They're trying to send us a message. Here it is... "The 30 second sell is fine, but we expect more. Leave the position papers in the drawer. Come out from behind the firewall and talk to us. Make us part of the conversation, or we'll find someone who will." In other words.....get real or die.

     If we're smart, we'll listen.

     So, where are we? You've come up with the Big Idea. You've organized it. Clarified it. Worried over it. At this point you have a fairly good idea of what you're going to say and how you're going to say it. You probably have a lot of information that you want your audience to absorb. How will you guide them through it without losing them? That's the subject of our next section....The Navigational Interface.