Adding great content to your website doesn’t have to mean you need to add a bunch of documents and words.    

When most people think about content they think about the company story, bios of important executives and plastering their site with press releases.    

 

Innovative companies think visually. They add interesting photos and interactive features.    

The good news is, you don’t have to have a photographer or graphic artist on staff to add interactive graphics and photos to your web site; there are plenty of free, cool tools to help you.    

      

 How about a timeline?        

Two great places that share info and reviews about free tools that can help you add graphs, word clouds, maps and even timelines are Poynter.com and Mark S. Luckie’s 10,000 Words blog.     

Both are sites widely read by journalists but I recommend them for anyone wanting to learn how to write better and faster, and who wants to learning more about online storytelling, cool tools, and how journalism is changing.     

  Poynter.org  describes itself as      

“the dominant provider of journalism news, with a focus on business analysis and the opportunities and implications of technology.”     

    

In Today’s Poynter How To, Whitney Mathews shared several data visualization tools for online storytelling.  She discussed the tools and shared her experiences with them. The tools: 
     

• Wordle.net for making word clouds,
• Dipity.com which makes cool timelines with text, links, data and video.
• BatchGeo.com lets you make interactive maps from spreadsheets
• Twitter has widgets you can customize to display anything from a single user account to an advanced search.

     

I was drawn to the timeline tool because I just finished pulling together details on all the restaurants opened and when by Tom Douglas Restaurants as part of a story I’m writing for several publications on Tom’s expansion.    

TDR CEO Pam Hinckley, who has heard before that the company’s website needs to do a better job of sharing basic facts, will be the recipient of a wonderful timeline once I create a dipity.com account and load the info. (I’ll post it here too once I get it finished.)       

Coincidently, I am pitching several stories on Ivar’s, Seattle’s favorite seafood bar and chowder maker, and the corporate web site does a great job of explaining the company’s 73-year-old history.     

Guess what? Ivar’s has a timeline.  It’s in a different format than Dipity, but I like the presentation they’ve used.     

    

WA Post’s National Innovations Editor is a Web Tool Junkie    

Mark S. Luckie is the Washington Post’s National Innovations Editor and creator of the 10,000 Words blog. The blog was sold recently to mediabistro.com but Luckie is still the editor.     

Luckie is widely known as a technology guru in the world of journalism and has a regular feature at 10,000 Words he calls Tool of the Day where he shares information and how to use the latest multimedia tools he has discovered and finds useful.     

His personal website contains examples of the cool content Luckie has created using various tools; check out his personal website’s multimedia page.  Oh the possibilities! 
    

What creative tools have you used to add cool content to your website?