photo by tiago . ribeiro
While everyone else is excitedly chatting up Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust
Kristina is the founder and president of Brain Traffic, a Minneapolis-based agency specializing in content strategy and writing for the web. She’s widely acknowledged as one of the leading authorities and evangelists for better web content.
One of the interesting paradoxes of the seemingly bottomless well that is the web is that, while you can pour an infinite amount of content into your site, too much information will overwhelm your audience and make your site less useful, not more. Likewise, poorly organized content will simply frustrate users and drive them away to simpler, more intuitive sites that offer what they seek.
Kristina’s book was just released and I haven’t had time to read it yet, but a quick skim tells me she’s a kindred spirit.
Her first admonition: Do less, not more. Yes, there is enormous pressure to constantly add more to a site as new products and services are introduced, tools such as Twitter and blogs generate additional content and, as Kristina puts it, “the Great River of Content flows freely, rapidly flooding our customers with too much information and drowning its keepers (web editors and content managers) in the process.”
But, she adds, web content is pretty much pointless unless it does one of two things:
1. Supports a key business objective.
2. Supports a user (or customer) in completing a task.
We’ve all been to sites that subscribe to the “more is better” approach. It isn’t. More’s just more. If there’s content on your site that doesn’t meet these objectives, chances are you don’t really need it to achieve your communication goals. Worse, it may be getting in the way.
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One word: Relevance.
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