Kinds of Content
The content of a website, the pages to be found on it, are the heart and soul of any website. Provided the layout doesn't hurt the visitor's eyes and the site isn't filled with browser-crashing scripts, it is the content that makes or breaks the site. But how do you make content if you're aiming for a successful website?
The Five Kinds of Content
Yes, there are five kinds of content, all of them very different, and play different roles in your site's recipe for success.
Sitely Content
This is any and all content containing information specifically pertaining to your website. A page with recent updates on the site is sitely content; a page with information about the webmaster is sitely content; FAQ, Contact Us, Link to Us and other such sections are all sitely content.
What sitely content basically has in common is that a website containing nothing but sitely content is completely worthless. People have no reason to be interested in sitely content unless they've already gotten an interest in the website on its own terms. If websites were video games, sitely content would be the instruction booklets. Instruction booklets in some form are always included with a video game, and when you have the game you might or might not want to look in the instruction booklet; either way they're nice to have, and practically all websites should have at least a section with recent updates. Nobody in their right mind, on the other hand, would want to buy a stand-alone instruction booklet, and when people review a game they generally don't pay any attention to the booklet unless it's missing very crucial information.
Basically, you'll need some minimal amount of sitely content and can expand upon it to have more extensive information about the site, but all it does is go with the site. It can't stand on its own, and how much of it you have will as a rule (provided you at least have the basic stuff that a visitor will really want to know such as how to contact you and what has been updated on the site) never do anything for the quality of your site. Sections such as "About Me" can always be nice for making your site feel less impersonal if that's what you want, however.
Useful Content
Useful content is the encyclopedic information, the walkthroughs, the resources, the reviews and the tutorials. Useful content is likely to be one of the primary attractions to your site from search engines: a fairly large number of my visitors, for example, are people looking for the level at which a certain Pokémon evolves who find my evolution list, a typical section of useful content, through a search engine. Basically useful content is the information you place on your site that some random person would be likely to specifically want and look for. On Pokémon sites this is most often game information, episode guides and so on, but also the various guides and resources found on some of them. Sites like Serebii.net consist mostly of useful content, although Serebii and a number of others also contain sections such as game mechanics (which vary in their practicality and are often more the geekier sort of interesting content) and Pokémon news (reporting content). Having good useful content is basically a matter of making sure that it's information somebody might need, that the information is accurate and that it is presented in a clear, accessible way.
Useful content is there so people can look it up. They need information, so they look for it on the Internet and find it, perhaps on your site. If many significantly more popular sites have all the useful content you would put up, it tends to be rather pointless to do so: those who are looking for it will be likelier to end up at the more popular sites, and it won't get you visitors not specifically looking for it. After all, nobody hangs around Serebii.net and reads all of its sections out of pure interest. Pretty much the only reason people regularly go to Serebii.net is to read the news on the front page. This is no coincidence: while useful content is good at hooking people in from search engines, it is absolutely hopeless at keeping people there. Nobody reads through a whole walkthrough just for the heck of it. They might at most bookmark it for the next time they need the information. If your site has purely useful content, you are not likely to gain many regular visitors.
Reporting Content
Reporting content is news, plain and simple - on Pokémon sites this would be Pokémon-related news. What reporting content does for your site is make sure that people visit it once a day; however, they are highly unlikely to find your site through a search engine if it only contains the news, and it is certain that they will never care much - they'll look at the latest headlines, read the full article if it interests them, and then leave.
It is next to impossible to make a name for yourself in the world of reporting content. Generally people find their news source (as the most known Pokémon news sites are Serebii.net and Bulbanews, almost everyone ends up going with one of them) and then stick with it for the rest of their Internet life unless they come to the conclusion that they've found one which is undeniably better in every way. Chances are your website will not have news undeniably better in every way than the big ones (in fact, most amateur websites attempting to have reporting content simply repeat whatever they post, which obviously isn't very likely to improve on it at all), and thus it is pretty much hopeless to even attempt to make reporting content an attraction on your site, much less the primary one.
Interesting Content
Interesting content is the stuff that people might be interested in seeing without having been specifically looking for it. This includes the less obviously practical game mechanics (which the geekier visitors will devour despite having no real use for them), opinions and theories, creative material, quizzes and games of various sorts, fun facts, and so on. Good interesting content either tells people something they didn't know before (in a loose sense ranging from specific facts to 'Oh, hey, I'm a Butterfree') or at least entertains them (again in a broad enough sense that, say, an extremely sad piece of fanfiction or a random piece of fanart counts as entertainment). A section consisting of, say, the sentence "Charizard has a flame on its tail" does neither, and therefore (since it is not any of the other kinds of content), it's a general failure as a section. I also think I speak for everyone when I say that we've all long gotten sick of those silly "Skateboarding Pikachu", "Raise a Pikachu" and "Catch Pidgeotto" games and they aren't very entertaining anymore; the same applies to most other unoriginal content, even if it was interesting the first time somebody did it. It's a good idea to stop before making a section of interesting content and ask yourself whether it really is interesting and/or entertaining; sometimes people are so caught up in being original (generally a very important principle of interesting content, since people tend to find things they've never seen before more interesting) that they forget this important part. Interestingly enough, the game sections to be found on a lot of Pokémon websites - basic information about a generation of Pokémon games saying little more than when it came out, how many Pokémon there are in it, the name of the Evil Team™ and such obvious tidbits as "The game features upgraded graphics" - are just this kind of useless (all that information is both common knowledge and would be more straightforward to find elsewhere), uninteresting and non-entertaining sections, basically not content at all. This kind of information can work as padding on a portal page that lists the sections you have about that game, but if you have no content about a game, it is pointless to have such a section.
Of course, people have a varying sense of what exactly is interesting. While some people will find a section interesting, others will not. You can try to appeal to a variety of tastes with your interesting content, or you can just focus on one type of interesting content with the aim of pleasing those who do find it interesting - a basic matter of target audience.
Interesting content is the opposite of useful content in terms of what it does for your site's popularity. A site with purely interesting content will generally get relatively little traffic from search engines; I'm not saying there will be none at all, but it is a fact that the number of people who search for interesting content tends to be minuscule compared to the number who search for useful content. On the other hand, sites with interesting content stay with the visitor longer; they're more likely to read through whole sections just for the heck of it, try all the games or browse through all the fanart, and visit it regularly from then on to watch the site for updates with more interesting content. Primarily, sites with interesting content flourish through word of mouth. I've found that my What Pokémon Are You? is one of the primary traffic generators for The Cave of Dragonflies, simply because people put their results in their forum signatures all over the Internet, people see them there, get interested and click them to see what they get. Of course interesting content also varies in how often people feel compelled to link to it.
But interesting content is the best way for a new site to shine. If you make high-quality interesting content that appeals to a lot of people, those who come to your site are sure to remember it and stick around, and you'll have an easier time getting others to link to you and affiliate with you. It's difficult to rise to fame in the world of useful sites as most information you might put on your site can be found elsewhere already and it's not unless it is very extensive and better presented than on any other useful site out there that it will generate any interest; interesting content, on the other hand, is always fresh, provided that it really is interesting.
Interactive Content
Interactive content is any facilities your site provides for visitors to communicate or share something with other visitors of the site. This includes guestbooks, shoutboxes, forums, oekakis and various contests in which people actually enter and something from them gets put onto the site.
People love interactive content when it's there. It makes the visitor feel more involved; a site without any interactivity feels more distant from the visitor and makes them less interested. However, like sitely content, it has a hard time standing on its own without the site having other attractions for people to find the site through. After all, nobody can take part in the interactivity if there are no people who visit the site.
This is the reason why stand-alone forums almost always fail: they're purely interactive content, and because nobody has any reason to go to a random stand-alone forum with no members, they simply won't. You can give your forum a major unique feature (e.g. a large forum RPG or very compelling collaborative project) to attract people and make them truly feel that this is a unique place on the Internet, but just having a random general Pokémon forum without giving people any reason to go to it rather than all the thousands of other such forums out there is pretty much always hopeless. When you've got a site with useful and/or interesting content to go with the forum, there will be a constant stream of people who find the site through some means and get to the forums from there, allowing it to work out better.
Conclusion
The best way to attract attention to your website and keep the visitors there is to have a combination of useful and interesting content; if you were to pick one or the other purely with the aim of getting visitors, you'd do better with interesting content since odds are most of the useful content you might place on your website can be found on other, bigger sites already. Interactive content and sitely content should generally only go with other interesting or useful content, as such sections do not attract visitors on their own (and in the case of sitely content, literally have no point whatsoever on their own).
Personally, I think websites pretty much need interesting content, and thus I give that a high priority when it comes to affiliation and awards.
Page last modified October 26 2008 at 19:05 GMT
