In my journey create my website, 949 Development, there’s one obstacle that has taken me much longer to do that I initially anticipated: Writing Content. You know, how when you go to a website and you see phrases like,”We here at [Company Name] work for you!” and things like, “For over 40 years, [Company Name] has …” I’m a developer, I don’t do this stuff.
I build my sites using Content Management Systems like Drupal or WordPress. These are great and powerful tools provided free online. The benefits of these is that you can enable the user to add/edit/delete content as they please. For the most part, I fill my content with what is known as “Lorem Ipsum” which basically generated latin that looks like real text. On my sites, in say the welcome area, you’ll see this as the text:
“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit”
The reason I use this is that it looks like english, much more than “blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah”.
But back to the topic at hand…
With 949 Development, I’ve had Lorem Ipsum everywhere. I told myself, “this wont be hard to do, I’ll do it after I develop the website”. Well, I’ve developed the website and it is a LOT harder than I thought. Coming up with words, sentences, etc… is hard when you are trying to sell the user on something. You see for my blog, I just rant and rant in case you haven’t noticed. If you like it awesome, if not you can close the window. For a Company Site however, you want your users to stay and read on because they are there for a reason.
I’ll show you an example of what I mean
So, you can see now that the top left text has the fake Lorem Ipsum text, and the other has real text. Even stuff like this is hard to do! Jeebus. I have these all over my websites, from descriptions, News articles, etc…Oh my lawdie lawdie, this is gonna take longer than I thought…
I will say I have learned from this experience though. Whenever I make websites for clients I always wait for the content to come in and always used to think, “C’mon now, all you are doing is writing, how hard can it be? I’m the one actually building the damn website. A computer language is harder than the english language.” Now I have a different mindset on things. I’ll say it, even though I never thought I’d say it, but coming up with content is hard. I kinda fear the fact I created a “News” section in my 949 Development website because that just means I have to write news articles every now and then.
It takes a long time to write this stuff, and I’m sure as hell it’s not perfect, but I will tell you something: If you come and get a website from me and you go to 949development.com, you will get me in all forms, from design, development, to even writing. Hey, although it’s not written perfectly remember I didn’t get an English degree, I got a Computer Science degree.
So for now just sit back and relax, I’m not done with my site yet. But I am greatful for this new appreciation I have for content writers. I’m also glad that I learned something new by going outside of my zone. Have you gone out of your zone, tried something you’re not really supposed or trained to do? Maybe you should try it, you’ll gain something out of it. Perhaps if writers tried to code a website they could appreciate the hard work that is involved, which would give both sides large amounts of respect for each other and resulting in some pretty good work that’s pumped out.