Authoring a Website
When you are creating content for your website you should write about what you know about. You should have a good understanding about what you are talking about, come on, who wants to go a mechanic that doesn't know what he's doing?
Content is the most important thing on your site, it's appearance is second. The appearance is important because even though your content may be unique and well written, if it hurts the eyes it won't be read for long.
The goal is to grab the users attention with headlines, being short and sweet if it does the job, and make it pleasant to read. Try asking some friends their opinion on the readability of your site.
Balancing Content and Design
I had a buddy who would whip out a new website layout for his new project but when it came to content he left it alone. This left his website sitting idle and eventually dying because he forgot to pay for it. I think it's wise to not take design or authoring to one extreme, but it would be wise to balance the two.
Ugly Site, Good Content. Have you have ever seen a student programmers website? Sometimes you may stumble upon a lousy ugly website, yet the site has all the content you were looking for so you stayed at the site despite the unsightly organization and ugly site.
Pretty Site, Bad Content. If you turn that example around, imagine the website design is extremely good yet has barely any content -- you would leave. Just because a website looks awesome doesn't make it a winner. I've learned to put content over design, and it took me a long time to find this out.
Blah Blah..
Filler the killer, filler text takes up space and covers nothing. Always make a clear point and stay on it! If you can offer easy to find information in your content users will more likely come back, bookmark or even suggest your site later on.
In general, people like things quick, easy, and to the point -- beating around the bush will drive visitors away!
Break it up
When I run into a website that has a massive amount of reading I lose attention quick, and so do most people. When you break it up with titles or steps people can scan to part they are looking for, this makes them happy! Imagine this page without titles, it'd look like a lot of text and you'd probably not read any of it.