What makes good web content? Yesterday I had the chance to discuss this question and learn from experienced web writers at our Copenhagen afternoon seminar on online communication (in Danish).
4 different practitioners showcased how they had cut the length of existing web texts down to half the size – and how that alone had resulted in increased sales and user satisfaction. By cutting the length in half (or more), the text became more readable and focused. One practitioner reported that this exercise took her approximately one hour per text, which was a very worthwhile investment.
Your efforts won’t yield many results though, if you prevent the users from finding your content in the first place. Many web writers are not choosing the right words, as Gerry McGovern recently commented:
“According to Google, every month an average of 300,000 people search for climate change, while 2.2 million search for global warming. Yet the official term on most government and media websites is climate change.”
When eliminating half the words, how are you making sure that the remaining words are the right ones? Feel free to share the short version of your best advice.
Caroline Coetzee March 3rd, 2009 12:40
Here’s what we advise trainee authors to our intranet (now if only they would follow this advice…)
1. Cut the fluff – take out all the stuff about how wonderful you are, all the adjectives and adverbs, all the ‘welcome to our website’ messages. Stick to the basic information you need to impart. This is the standard advice and it will reduce your writing somewhat, though not by half.
2. Cut the repetition – this is the bit that really takes out the bulk of unecessary verbiage, in my experience. We all do it. You start something, you write some more, then you write something that really says exactly the same as the first bit, only expressed slightly differently. Or you say something like ‘We are the xxx dept/company’ when the heading of the page is ‘xxx dept/company’.
Don’t get me wrong, repetition has it’s place for emphasis or driving home a point. But mostly, if you read your text carefully you can get rid of a surprising amount of unneeded repetition.
3. Write for the reader: again, this is something we all say, but few of us do. We mean to write for the reader, but actually we write for ourselves and get carried away with the beauty of our arguments and our wonderful turn of phrase. Or we write for a really dumb reader who couldn’t possibly understand something if we explained it in a straightforward, simple way, once! It amuses me, this one, because in underestimating our readers’ intelligence, we actually make things harder for them to understand.
4. Forget the three clicks rule – we see a lot of long, jumbled copy where people are trying to squish all their information into a really flat structure and reduce the number of clicks. Much better to have more concise pages, clearly linked through a path that may take the user a little further from the home page, but at least knowing where they are and what they are reading.
5. Edit, edit, edit – and then have someone else proofread: this is probably the nub of the matter. All of the above advice depends, not just on writing good copy, but on editing that copy. And then having somebody else read it and cut it down further, if at all possible. I suspect that most of the poor copy on the websites I am responsible for, is the result of things written in a fine stream of consciousness and then not properly edited thereafter, if at all…