It’s early days yet for this blog, but you need to know up-front that in my “other life” I’m a bird-nerd. From time to time I likely will digress into “significant info” about our feathered friends to make a point about significant information for businesses. So, please indulge me for a few paragraphs—my point this time pertains to the need for significant content on your website.
A Truly Remarkable Creature
According to the Otago Peninsula Trust of New Zealand, “A soaring albatross seen against sea or sky is a sight to bring delight, perhaps even inspiration. Elegant, incredibly graceful in flight, seldom flapping a wing, yet dipping and swooping, turning and soaring, the albatross presents a spectacle touched with dignity and majesty no other seabird can excel.”
Albatross: The Bird
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the albatross as “any of a family (Diomedeidae) of large web-footed seabirds that have long slender wings, are excellent gliders, and include the largest seabirds.”
The Wandering Albatross and the Southern Royal Albatross are the largest types of albatrosses and among the largest of all flying birds. They have tip-to-tip wingspans from 9 to 11 feet, and large adult males are heavyweights – 13 to 26 pounds in weight.
The sea and sky are their dominion, and both can travel incredible distances over long periods of time. For example, after leaving a colony as a fledgling, a juvenile bird might spend as much as 6 years at sea before returning and reestablishing its contact with land.
In short, albatrosses are beautiful, long-lived seabirds whose (remember this!) form and function are optimized for the environment they live in—most particularly, the Southern Ocean off South America, Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and Antarctica.
Albatross: The Other Meaning
The word albatross has also come to mean something that causes persistent, deep concern or anxiety; something that greatly hinders accomplishment. This meaning evolved in reference to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Coleridge’s poem, an albatross follows a ship (a sign of good luck) and is killed by the mariner (which curses the ship), who is forced to wear the dead albatross around his neck (as a punishment and reminder) until all his shipmates die from the curse. So, albatross has also come to be used as a metaphor for an encumbrance or hindrance or a burden to be carried as penance.
What Does This Have to Do with Your Web Content?
Clearly, any content you create needs to emulate the bird, not the metaphor. Your goal should be to create elegant, efficient, satisfying content that is optimized for its environment—namely the Web and your clients’ or prospects’ needs.
Your content needs to create an environment whose form and function model what your customers care about, need and will spend time exploring, engaging with and sharing with their colleagues. The last thing you want your Web content to become is an albatross—in the second meaning—either for your company or for the customers you hope to attract and serve.
