Your Website in the Clouds – Does Your Content Reflect Your Goals?


The other day my wife was using Word Clouds as a teaching tool and it got me thinking about how it would be useful to apply them to websites. A word cloud picks out the most used words from a page or speech. For example, CBS compared the speeches of Dick Cheney and Barack Obama, which gave an interesting ‘look’ at the themes of each speech and the words they used repeatedly to promote their message. Websites need to grab people’s attention too so I looked at some examples:

What does our home page content look like as a word cloud?

Word Cloud of Union Street Media

Union Street Media’s Home Page Content as a Word Cloud

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This visual view of the most used words on a page, is helpful to get a feeling for the content on a website. Certain words along with images form the first touch point a visitor experiences. This is important to get right, as your home page will be the most viewed page and becomes your elevator pitch.

Here’s another one for Whole Food’s blog content:

Word Cloud for Whole Foods Blog

As you can see by Whole Food’s blog content, it’s fairly accurate of what you would expect to read about. They are expanding their message to educate and celebrate food in their blog.

Does your content reflect your message?

Pay attention to how often you use certain terms and the message you want to get across as quickly as possible, as you will often only get one chance.

By Tom Cull