Content, Structure, and Relevance: The Ploy’s the Thing (Part One of Four) by Geoff Hart

Description: In this article, Hart outlines the basic requirements for and entailed the problems with “attracting and retaining an audience on the Web.” One has to have a great amount of determination and wit in creating a webpage if they wish to have frequent as well as return visitors. The three elements that must be present in proper order are the following: content, structure, and relevance.

Content according to Hart includes the use of “Flash and Shockwave” and as long as the webpage creator is not Macbeth’s “idiot” there could be something to work with. One needs to use innovation in their writing to present their ideas in an interesting manner, less they decide it is time to lose the reader’s attention. Perhaps most importantly, content included needs to be adequately relevant to a reader’s needs or it serves them no purpose.

The problem with content that Hart mentions is with the unification of its definition; there are so many disjointed ideas of what the word actually means that it creates confusion in what a reader really wants (the need for “pretty pictures” vs. engineer quality design specs).

Structure is completely necessary, according to Hart, and without it your audience will have trouble in finding the content of fantastic quality which you have designed. The main problem with this is that people have very short attention spans—especially now—and unless the content is near in quality to the abstract for the cure to cancer Hart says that the reader won’t continue to buy it and will go on to something more structured. The key here is to understand how the reader will be expecting to find their desired information, in knowing their “behavior” and through process, one can help provide the outline for how to arrange a work.

The problem with structure in Hart’s mind is that a reliance on a built-in search engine in a site to pick up the pieces where there is a lack of necessary organization is an ineffective use of the digital salvaging of “information architecture.” The point is that there are times when a search engine is quite useless in finding what one wants.

Relevance requires that the information relate to the reader’s needs. The myth that content needs to be new to have relevancy is quite untrue, according to Hart. This does solely depend on the actual content, for example a news page should be somewhat updated with a certain subject whereas as the same importance for freshness might not be needed in say “sales figures for the recent Beatles anthologies.”

The problem with relevance lies with its subjective nature, that it is in the eye of the beholder will ultimately determine what is and isn’t pertinent to a certain listing.

In my opinion a written work can be very useful with possibly one or two of the above elements missing. For example, one could have a completely irrelevant article that has the utmost quality structure allowing a reader to easily envelop themselves in the material. However diverting or distracting this could be it nonetheless gathers the reader’s interest, so I would disagree on this point. The rest of the article seems to be fairly well constructed.