Often the most neglected part of a website is its content. Time and time again we see a regurgitation of offline marketing material simply ported over to websites with no thought or strategy. This article will give you some simple techniques you can use right away to help improve your website and its content.
Will The Real Content Please Stand Up
Content is king has to be the most clichéd statement in web design, but it is probably the truest statement you will hear when it comes to your website. Content is the backbone of the internet, it was designed to be a library of information, and it still holds that principle today.
The web is all about visitor engagement, and no matter what type of website you run, you need to ensure the people that are coming to your site are fully engaged with the message you are trying to get across. Unfortunately, what we have seen from websites is simply a regurgitation of offline marketing literature, which in many cases just does not translate very well to the web.
When creating your web copy it should be:
- Engaging
- Simple
- Short
- Scannable
Fortunately, there are a few simple techniques you can use to make your copy more web friendly and engaging, there is still a lot more to learn before you become a pro copywriter but these simple techniques can at least get you on your way.
Simple Is As Simple Does
Using long complicated words or technical phrases really will not help visitors or worse switch them off your site completely. When you are writing your copy make sure you keep it simple by using common words and simple punctuation, this will ensure your content is more accessible to the majority of your readers.
Stop The Noise
One of my favourite books is Don’t make me think by Steve Krug and the main reason for that is its short, concise and to the point (great for me and my short attention span). Steve states that most copy on a website is not required and you should generally remove half of the words on each page, and then try and remove half again.
That may sound a bit extreme but his point is you don’t have to overload your visitors with content that doesn’t need to be there. Use short words, sentences, paragraphs and bulleted lists, try to keep your pages short so not to overwhelm you readers, and once its written refine it further until you know there is no more unnecessary copy kicking around.
You may say to yourself “What if i can’t make it short?”, well in this instance some good advice from the fine people over at Yahoo is to put a summary or bullet list of topics at the top of the page (front loading) to give an overview of what is in the article so that users can quickly figure out if the content is for them.
I can see my content from here!
There is a misconception that people do not read on the web, that’s not really true. People do read online but they will only commit to reading once they feel your content has spoken to them and is relevant to their needs.
When we are reading a newspaper or browsing a website we have this ability to scan and look for information that is specific to why we looked at the article in the first place. Mandy Brown in her article In Defence of Readers (2009) put this pre-reading phase as the most important as it was in that short period where you would decide if they should stop and leave or carry on and read.
Fortunately there are some simple techniques that can be used to help improve the scannability of your content and help visitors decide quickly if your article will be worth their investment of time to read.
Give your readers a heads up!
Headings are really important to the structure of a page as they give a specific vantage point for users. You should use headings to break your page into manageable sections that lead themselves to be easily scanned.
Be Upfront
Front loading is a method that places the most important information at the top of the page or at the front of things like headings and paragraphs. What this does is allow users to quickly scan and find out if the document is really what they were looking for.
If it's important show people
When something needs to stand out you need to emaphise this through the visual cues you have at your disposal. In his great book The Website Owner’s Manual (2010), Paul Boag advises us to “Highlight important content. Whether you use bold and italic or do a magazine style pull-out quotes make sure important content stands out”. This ensures that the content you really want your users to see is easily identifiable and is not lost within the rest of the page.
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