You’ve worked hard to get this far.
You’ve found a great piece of land, poured a solid foundation, framed and roofed your house, built the inside walls, and picked out the perfect doors and windows and siding.
Now it’s time to move indoors.
The last step — but by no means the least important one — is to finish the inside of your house.
This is your content.
Just as you can always find something to redecorate in your house — whether it’s painting a wall or ripping out the ugly old carpet and replacing it with gleaming hardwood or tile floors — you’ll be adding content to your website on a regular basis.
Your site content is what visitors come to your site to find. It’s what keeps them coming back for more.
It can be
- written articles like this one
- video
- audio recordings
- images
- slide shows
- specialty content (think listings on a real estate agent’s site)
- any combination of the above
Your site’s topic will dictate the kind of content you create.
If you’re a professional photographer, you’ll want a gallery for your images.
If you teach people how to create video, you’ll feature videos.
Those are obvious.
For most of us, though, you’ll use some combination. On this site, you’ll see a lot of written content. When you get to the nitty-gritty “how to” topics, you’ll find some video and slide shows in the mix.
Fortunately, your WordPress website makes it easy to include all types of content.
Different Uses for Different Content
In your home, you decorate rooms differently depending on what they’re used for. You wouldn’t normally use the same decor in your dining room as in your baby’s nursery, for example.
So you use different kinds of content depending on what you want to accomplish with it.
Some content will give away information.
Some will showcase what you’re selling.
Some will show your reader how to do something.
Some will be designed to attract new readers, and some to attract old visitors back.
Have you ever heard of “layering” your room’s design? It’s a term decorators use often.
When you layer a room, you start with the unifying layer — usually color — then add floor treatments, window treatments, furniture styles, textures, accent colors, and so on.
As a website owner, you’ll also layer your content.
How Do You Layer Content?
Translated into website terms, color becomes your “pillar” or “cornerstone” content.
These are the most basic pieces of content for your subject. They deal with fundamentals, and they’re not going to change often.
What’s the cornerstone content for WordPress Building Blocks? It’s the seven building blocks we’ve identified.
One website dealing with healthy lifestyle choices sports three areas of pillar content: brain health, fitness and nutrition. Copyblogger has seven cornerstone topics. That’s about the max you should have. (Amazon.com has 16, but honestly, if you’re visiting WordPress Building Blocks and reading these emails, you’re not in that league. Neither am I.)
Once your cornerstone content is in place, you start adding layers of additional content.
For example, WordPress Themes is an important topic here at WordPress Building Blocks.
The cornerstone content is the article about what themes do for your WordPress website.
Once that’s in place, I can create tons of content about themes. I can discuss:
- pros and cons of a new theme that’s just been released
- types of themes and where to use them
- interesting or creative uses of particular themes
- new theme developers
- how to customize a theme
- how to hire someone to customize a theme
- and on and on
You get the idea.
Some of these will be written articles, some will include video or audio. Most will include images or slide shows.
All of these will add layer upon layer to this WordPress-based virtual home of mine.
That’s what you’ll be doing on your WordPress site, too, before you know it.
Are you ready to get started building your virtual online home?
It all starts with registering your domain name.