On the surface, the social networking craze (e.g Twitter) might suggest that today’s web readers are primarily concerned with mass culture and convenience. The good news is that society has come a long way since the 1960s when Andy Warhol championed Pop Art. Today’s web audience needs good information in a short amount of time. These web surfers will click around until they find information they need.

As a website owner, your mission is to develop quality web content that will complement your technical strategies for generating web traffic and client transactions. The text on every page of your website should withstand the evaluation of people with strong information literacy skills. If you ignore this business goal, you will undermine the value of your website.

In the Information Literacy Standards for Science and Engineering/Technology developed by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), one indicator of information literacy is that the student “considers the costs and benefits of acquiring the needed information.” This concept affects your web audience.

An information-literate reader can browse quickly around a business website and determine if the information is worth reading. This decision is made quickly (i.e. in a matter of seconds). If you can convince readers to stay on your website with quality content, you can be confident that your business connects well with your target audience.

Good web content should reinforce information literacy by appealing to the reader’s intelligence. Educate readers through informative web content instead of relying on blind trust. As a manager of web content, you can write or purchase quality articles based on adequate research, accurate representation of subject matter, informative style, and themes that promote your products or services in the web environment.

Web readers also enjoy web content they can use again. These readers come back to dependable sites unexpectedly. You can perform your own litmus test for web content using a consumer’s perspective. An example of a website evaluation checklist can be downloaded for free from the University of California Berkeley Library (Lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/EvalForm.pdf). Use this checklist to evaluate each web page on your site.

Your attractive web content will appeal to readers and market your company in a passive way. Through positive web marketing, you foster stronger business-client relationships. Web readers become consumers of your products and services.

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