BDA - Be Digitally Creative ...

Celebrating over three years of Awarding online creativity where we find it - Be creative, be inspired

Criteria for winning a BDC Award for online publishers

Content
The content itself must be high quality. It needs to be accurate and grammatically correct. It needs to be concise and free from formatting or spelling errors. Ultimately, it must contain something actually worth saying. Small errors and inaccuracies, obvious omissions and wild exaggerations - all these undermine the good work of your content.

Context
To be worthwhile, your content needs to be relevant to the general subject of the site, and relevant to the section of the web site in which it is placed Beatwolf is an excellant example of the use of contemporary comment .

The content itself could be of the highest quality, but if it is irrelevant or incongruous, it will destroy the flow of the site and lead your visitors into dead ends.

If your site is structured around selling your books and newsletters about stationery, for instance, why include stock prices or weather forecasts?

Even if they are slick and sophisticated, with interactive graphics and constantly updating content - if it doesn't lead your visitors towards fulfilling their goals - or your goals - it will be a distraction. In the worst case, it will distract the visitors and provide them with a convenient route out of your web site, before they can become a customer.

Contribution
The content needs to contribute something to the overall message or purpose of the web site. It may be high quality content, exquisitely written and beautifully presented, and linked seamlessly into the flow and structure of the site, but if it contributes little or nothing towards the overall purpose of your site, it is a wasted effort.

Whether you want your site to educate, inform or amuse your visitors; whether you want to encourage and entice your site visitors with products and services that you would like them to purchase from you - or from your re sellers; whether you want your visitors to feel confidence in your brand or company; your content must reinforce this purpose and lead your visitors towards the goals of your site.

Conclusion
Unless your site content can match up well to the three C's: content, context and contribution it isn't content at all - it's just a distraction and you may be better off without it.

 

Authoring Services
■Marketing Copy
■Newsletters
■Internet Content
■Press Releases
■Business Plans
■Process Documents
■System Manuals

Online, Authoring covers all copywriting activities that create or modify the text based content associated with your Web site.

From the key headlines and and image titles through to the main body of the documents themselves, documents from a professional copy writer will serve your business well.

Documents written for print media may work well originally, but will almost always need some modification for use on the Internet: Internet based readers have different habits to print readers.

Offline, your business may be looking to produce business plans and baselines, training manuals or process documentation.

These could be for third parties to read - such as financiers and investors - or for internal use as benchmarking tools to show you where your business is today.

In either case, well written documents reap rewards in the long term.