Ramblings
» Quality Versus Quantity?
Ever since my first days on the web, I’ve noticed an ongoing trend that’s been plaguing numerous websites, particularly in the “personal graphic site” category. This trend isn’t age-specific in the least; I’ve noticed that people of all ages succumb to it. At this point, I feel that a mention of this trend is warranted.
I’m one of those people who values quality over quantity. If I see someone featuring 100 tutorials on useless things alongside someone featuring five helpful, unique tutorials that look like effort was put into them, I’ll undoubtedly choose the latter over the former. While some might argue that the former is better because it looks like there’s more content, ultimately, I’ll still pay no regard to the quantity. My reasoning? It’s more beneficial to the user.
As a visitor, quality content saves me time. It saves me the time of rushing through a number of pages that are probably useless to me, possibly resulting in the crash my browser. And although one could argue that reading a long, quality tutorial could take even more time, at least I’m having a more enjoyable experience reading one informative article than aimlessly clicking through dozens of crappy pages.
Of course, I can understand why people value quantity first. Once you create your very first website, what’s the first thing you want to do? The answer is to add content and make it appear as though your website is important and informative. And having observed quite a few websites in the past, I believe that my explanation is fairly accurate.
In fact, I can somehow relate to the “add-content-aholic” mindset myself. My first domain, which was entitled “Smashed-Crayon”, was created last May and then deleted the subsequent January. I remember that my first impulse was to add as much content as possible, while paying no attention to practicality or usability. I added numerous brushes, glitters, tutorials…the list was endless. While I’m sure that at least some of it was useful to at least a few people, I’m ashamed to say that most of the content didn’t serve a purpose greater than making my pages look filled to the brim with content. Once January came around, I felt up to my knees in useless crap, which was one factor that played a role in my decision to delete the site altogether.
I’m not really sure how we’d all go about eliminating the problem itself. I’m sure that a lot of people are still going to add content that doesn’t serve much of a purpose, but at least we know why this is happening. I think the only thing we can do is convince people to settle down and think about their actions before committing to them.
For instance, we can tell them to ask themselves questions before creating the content, such as, “why am I creating this?” and “who will benefit, and how?” Possibly even most importantly, we can tell people to ask themselves, “have I seen this piece of content before–in one form or another?” One of the biggest ways that one can tell if quantity is being abused is if the content itself seems generic. For instance, the usual HTML tutorials that tell you how to do easy things like bolden your text (but without going much further indepth) would be classified as “generic”–thus contributing to quantity-abuse. Once people start asking themselves these questions and analyzing why they create things, they can stop themselves before making any potentially bad decisions.
You might be asking, “Why is ‘Quantity’ such a bad thing,
anyway?”
The answer is that quantity isn’t a bad thing in itself–it’s the
abuse of quantity that one should worry about. It’s having a desire to make a
large, useful webpage but going about it in a way that is useful for no one. This only
happens when a person creates content without having the user in mind. Remember:
the only way one’s content can truly achieve the level of “quality”
is if he or she considers the visitor when creating it.
But to fully answer the question, when you abuse quantity, the following negative things can happen:
- Your visitors can become frustrated. After clicking through 50 different tutorials on things he already knows about/doesn’t care to know about, he feels as though he’s wasted too much time. As a result, your visitors could leave, or worse–never come back.
- Your site–you know, the one you wanted to be the best ever–has now dropped a notch and isn’t as good in terms of quality. You’ve totally thrown away all chances of having a website that’s truly great.
The biggest lesson that can be learned here is that each website owner must always think of his or her visitors before anything else. As this happens, the person can earn respect and satisfaction. And isn’t that what every webmaster wants?