If you are involved in any Internet activity, particularly for work or business, you may have come across the term "Web content". It may seem an odd expression and understandably baffles people. However, it is a key concept to understand if you are trying to make a success of an Internet business or other online project. In this article we will outline what Web content is, how it is produced and what people use it for.
Content Types
The Web presents many different types of content to the people browsing it. Content types include text, data and various media types such as images, video, audio and animation, not to mention interactive components. Most modern Web pages contain multiple types of content within them, since Web users have come to expect a stimulating, engaging and interactive experience when they visit a site.
If you are building a website, it is necessary to give careful consideration to the content you wish to include on each page. Striking a balance between having enough content and not too much can be tricky. Text content is arguably the most important in terms of success or failure. Successful text content for a website is relevant to the purpose of the site, provides useful material to the people visiting the site and is written to a high standard of quality.
For media content types, there are a number of additional considerations. For certain media items such as audio, video and animation, end-users may require particular software programs. This can naturally cause problems accessing those media items, particularly for users of certain device types and operating systems. It is also important to remember that many website users are now browsing on mobile devices such as smartphones, netbooks and tablet PCs. In these cases, there may be a low bandwidth and limited Internet connectivity generally. For this reason it is advisable to use media items such as images with the smallest file sizes you can achieve while still maintaining an acceptable level of quality.
Content Delivery
Websites use a variety of techniques for delivering their content to users. Most sites are now dynamic, which means that the content is stored in database systems and built into Web pages when users' browsers request them. This process involves server side scripting. Server side scripts run when users request pages, fetching data from the database and building it into the resulting pages before returning these to the browser, or client.
Dynamic techniques have also produced Content Management Systems for authoring and delivering content. A CMS system allows people who do not have Web development or programming skills to create and publish website content. CMS programs such as Joomla and Wordpress are behind many of the most successful sites on the Web, for retail businesses, online newspapers and magazines, social media sites and many more.
How is Content Used?
Of course the most obvious use of content is to convey information to website users, but there is a lot more to it than that. Some organisations also create text content to drive traffic to their sites, publishing the content on other sites such as blogs and including links back to their own Web properties from there.
Many people focus on attracting search engine traffic using Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques to tailor the text content of a site. These techniques have a limited and reducing value, as the search engines are always improving their algorithms to present their users with the most relevant results first. The only genuine way to perform well in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) is to focus on creating good quality, relevant content on your site.
At its essence, Web content is anything you see on a website. However, the surrounding issues are complex and making best use of content can have a huge impact on the outcome of any Internet project.
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