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Web management is like tax insofar as it involves a lot of numbers. Page views, unique visits, bounce rate, click-throughs: these are some of the statistics that help form a view of how successfully a site is performing. They are important to the editor, to his or her colleagues in the marketing and sales departments, and to the company’s advertisers.
Of course, in this instance, by ‘editor’ I mean me. Every morning, I check to see how many visits Taxation.co.uk enjoyed the previous day. I keep an eye on the ‘reads’ counts of individual articles. I receive email alerts from Google’s Analytics and Adwords services.
I am sent rundowns of figures from Taxation’s marketing managers, who diligently compare online activity from each week and month with previous periods.
You get my gist: numbers are an important aspect of running this site – but I’m a journalist by training and trade (I rely on my colleagues for tax expertise) and for me, the most significant facet of this online service is, not unsurprisingly, the words.
‘Content is king’ is an internet meme, a catchphrase that crops up again and again throughout the online world. It’s also a philosophy for web management to which many people adhere, and it’s particularly beloved within the marketing and search engine optimisation (SEO) sectors.
Of course, the phrase has its naysayers; back in 2001 – an age ago in digital terms – mathematics boffin Andrew Odlyzko professed that content was in fact not king. Communication was the ruler of the internet, he claimed, and email was ‘the true “killer app”’.
To that I say… yeah, probably. One would suggest that Mr Odlyzko’s declaration, while made so long ago – again, relatively speaking – stands up still given the popularity of Facebook, Twitter and other social networking offerings (let’s not get into that right now). But social networking is not what Taxation.co.uk is about.
Here, content is king. I don’t think I’d be far wrong in speculating that you didn’t visit today in the hope of chitchatting with other tax experts. Yes, we encourage subscribers to leave comments on articles and engage with one another that way, but we provide no significant opportunities for connectivity (though we have a few courtesy of third parties, including LinkedIn and the aforementioned social networking giants).
Taxation.co.uk is a fundamentally a lovely, big archive of news, comment and analysis that is constantly improved upon and which dates back to the site’s inception in 2000 (perhaps one day the whole of the magazine’s 80-plus years of content will be digitised).
Not only is there every article published in print for the past ten years (if you discover omissions, please let me know), but there is also ‘added-value’ content like this very column, the blog, our recently launched podcast for busy tax advisers, polls and e-newsletters – none of which appears anywhere but online. (An inky version of this column was once available, but no longer.)
However, those stats I mentioned earlier constantly show that people visit mainly for the big stuff: the in-depth articles – that are sometimes ribald, often deeply technical – written by our title’s impressive stable of thoroughbred tax experts. So that’s what we concentrate on providing.
Enter ‘content is king’ into Google and the results will include such illuminating advice as ‘good content… will be interesting and very informative’ and ‘engage the reader’. I hope this isn’t overly technical for you.
While risibly obvious, those tips do serve a purpose: they help reinforce my point in that without words (be they in typed or audio format) that didn’t strive to grab our readers and cram them full of knowledge without causing discomfort, the Taxation website would be a very empty place. User-friendliness, handsome design and all the rest of it are pointless without something good to read.
I am keen to learn what readers would like to see (or indeed hear) among our online content. I can’t promise that you’ll influence editorial policy in the magazine – Taxation’s overlord, Mike Truman, has the say on such a matter – but you could help decide what extra information this website offers in the future.
