Effective web content: Entice and engage your users
Posted March 30th, 2008
As we described in a previous post content is king these days when it comes to search engine optimisation. Search engines love regularly updated fresh content, this post explains how to make your users love it too.
Many people don’t realise that writing copy for the web is totally different to writing for other mediums such as print. Internet studies have shown that you only have 3 – 5 seconds to attract your users attention and 12 seconds of writing to keep it. Even if you manage to do that the average user will not spend more than 7 – 12 minutes on your website so it’s vital your copy is short and snappy to entice and then engage your users.
Scanability
It may not be a real word but once you understand what it means you will be able to engage your readers so much better. Because of difficulties looking at screens, long line lengths and the fact that the web is overloaded with information users online don’t read entire web pages word-by-word. They scan them and read the bits that attract their attention.
Make your content easy to scan by:
- Using bullet points instead of long paragraphs where appropriate
- Use lots of headings and subheadings to break up the page
- Highlight keywords using bold and colour to make them stand out
- Limit each paragraph to one main idea
- Start the page with the conclusion and a short summary (‘inverted pyramid’ style)
Keep it short
As well as being scanable your content needs to be short. Users won’t read large pages of information on screen so it’s pointless being there. All it will do is make your page harder to scan and put users off. Steve Krug (usability expert and author of Don’t Make Me Think!) says “Get rid of half of the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left”. Of course he’s exaggerating slightly for effect but it’s a good point to remember. Keep text to a minimum and get rid of any words not serving a purpose.
Be friendly & personal
The internet is very impersonal and most people don’t consider computers to be friendly either. Your writing style needs to be friendly and approachable which will help to gain a users trust.
Don’t use ‘happy talk’
Steve Krug defines ‘happy talk’ as anything that fails to convey useful information. For example sentences that begin with “welcome to…”
Avoid jargon
Your users may not have any previous knowledge of your industry. So there is a good chance that they will not know all of the acronyms and industry terms that you do. Is is best to avoid this type of jargon but at the very least you must explain it when it is used. A useful tip is to get a person not involved with your industry to read it to see if they understand.
