I think schools have a lot to answer for when it comes to poor Web site content. They encourage students to fill their essays with filler by giving minimum word counts and often the only other writing that students do is write science reports.

Most science reports start by outlining the experiment and giving information about what should happen, but doesn’t give a conclusion until the end. While this way of writing is fine for a science report, students often come away writing everything else the same. If this style is used on a Web site then it means that users have to read the whole page (or at least scroll through the whole page), to reach the conclusion. According to research done by the Nielsen Norman Group, only around 20% of users see 2 or more screens of information on each page. That means that on a page with a fair amount of information only 20% of users will see the conclusion if you leave it until the end.

Most newspaper articles on the other hand start by giving a summary of the whole story including the conclusion, then add more detail to the story as it continues. This means that almost all users will see the conclusion if they just want a simple answer and can continue reading if they want more detail. It also helps the user to know that they are in the right place as they can quickly see a summary of what the whole page is about.

Bite size chunks

Using lists can help break up content into chunks that are easier to understand and remember. Research by usability expert Jakob Nielsen shows that using lists can improve readability by 47%.

Using lists helps to highlight important information and so helps people complete tasks more quickly and accurately.

Creating readable lists

Start a list with a leading sentence fragment that each of the items in the list complete.

e.g.

Some of the ways to make your Web site more readable are using:

• highlighted key words and phrases,
• meaningful titles and headings,
• concise text and short paragraphs,
• conversational style,
• bulleted lists and numbered steps,
• inverted pyramid style.

Make sure the first words in each list item are important information carrying words. Try not to include duplicate words at the beginning of multiple lines or begin lines with filler words like “an” or “a”.

It may be worth writing all of the list items you want first and then write the leading sentence to include those items without filler text. You’ll probably then need to change the list items too to make sense.

Don’t overuse lists though, if your page is filled of lists that each have only 2 items you’ve probably taken it too far.

Numbered steps

Numbered steps are a great way of providing instructions. It’s easy to keep track of where you are with numbered steps to carry out a task like baking a cake or finding a pub.

Try to break the steps down into individual smaller tasks that are easy to do.

This might be a good way of making a task that seems difficult into a more manageable one.

Why use a conversational style?

The original purpose of the Web was to share things, and that is still what it’s used for today. Many people are part of communities on the Web, whether it’s Facebook or a specialist site about our hobbies and interests. This means that we expect a more personal and conversational tone than some other forms of communication.

What is a conversational style?

Make writing on the Web more personal and conversational, by using I, we, you and us.

Express yourself in a more personal way.

I have made a mistake instead of a fault has become apparent.

Use an active voice.

I have taken steps to put it right instead of steps have been taken to put it right.

Telephone conversation

Be careful with being conversational though, because the Web is not a face to face conversation. When we talk to someone face to face, the words only account for about 10% of the conversation between us. Without the extra visual cues it is easy to misunderstand our words. When we have a conversation over the telephone though, we don’t have those visual cues.

So try to write the way you would have a telephone conversation.

Steve Krug in his book Don’t Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability goes as far as saying:

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

If people only scan Web pages, then most of what you write won’t be read. So why bother writing it?

Writing less means that only the valuable information is left and doesn’t get drowned out with useless noise.

Writing less

The first thing to remove is the filler text, the kind of thing that doesn’t really need to be there, but fills up empty space. On a portfolio page, do we really need

Here are some of the Web sites I’ve designed or developed lately.

It’s not as though our portfolio page is going to promote someone else’s work, so it’s just filler text.

The next thing is to remove redundant words:

• Don’t say the same thing twice (e.g. past history, careful consideration);
• Use 1 word instead of 2 (e.g. merge together, ongoing plan);
• Use 1 word instead of a phrase (e.g. apply instead of make an application)

We often try to use more words to impress people and make them think we are clever, but we impress them more when we are clear and concise.

Short paragraphs

Use 1 subject per paragraph.

The first 2 words should be important information carrying words so that readers scanning the text quickly know if the paragraph contains what they are looking for.

Short paragraphs break up the text better, allow white space and don’t give the reader a solid wall of text that’s hard to read. Shorter paragraphs are also easier to understand because people don’t have to process as much information.

If you use titles and headings that are not obvious then people have to think about what they mean. Usability expert Steve Krug‘s first law of usability is:

“Don’t make me think!”

To help people find the information they are looking for, we need to provide good information scent. If we make our titles and headings too clever and full of plays of words, then we don’t provide good information scent.

Helping people find your page

Page titles and headings are both considered important by search engines.

If you use meaningful titles and headings these will quite often contain the words that people will be searching for. Using relevent key words and phrases in your titles and headings help make your page appear more important to search engines, so your page will appear closer to the top.

Not only do search engines place importance on titles, they also use page titles to display search results.

How many times have you clicked on a link in a list of serach engine results only to find that the page has nothing to do with what you were searching for? If you make sure that your title describes the content of the page well then people will find what they are looking for and build confidence in trusting you. If they click on a link and the content does not match the content then instead they will lose confidence, beacause they were fooled into visiting your site.

Signposts for people reading the page

Providing good titles helps people to know they are reading the right page for the information they want. Good headings help people to find that information on the page.

Remember in Why is writing for the Web different?, we looked at how people read Web pages. Providing meaningful headings as signposts helps people to scan the page and find the section of the page with specific information they are looking for.

Why is highlighting key words and phrases important?

When people are trying to find information on a Web site, they usually scan the text looking for key words or phrases.

These key words and phrases either act as sign posts to a larger piece of information or can be important pieces of information themselves.

How to highlight key words and phrases (and how not to)

There are a number of ways to highlight text, some of the ways that you might highlight text in other places should not be used on Web sites.

Do highlight key words and phrases by using:

• bold text (this is sometimes called strong emphasis);
• numerals (e.g. 5) instead of words (e.g. five) for factual information (numbers help the text stand out among words);
• colour (but don’t use blue, see below for the reason why).

Italic text is often also used, however it can be harder to read. If you want to use it then I’d suggest no more than 2 words of italic text.

Don’t highlight key words and phrases by using:

• ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (using all capital letters is considered shouting and seen as rude);
• underlined text (underlining usually means that the text is a link);
• blue text (again blue text usually means that the text is a link).

Capital letters are not only considered shouting and seen as rude, capital letters are more difficult to read. When text is all in capital letters it takes people longer to read because the letter shapes are less distinct than lower case letters.

In fact people often ignore text in capitals altogether as Susannah Ross says in her book “Writing for the Web“:

The irony is that in text where writers put important information in capitals precisely to draw our attention to it, we tend to skip it.

Don’t highlight too many key words and phrases otherwise nothing stands out. Only highlight words and phrases that help people find the right part of the page to get the information they are looking for or important pieces of information.

Web sites are read in a very different way to either books or reports. The biggest difference is that with books and reports you usually start at the beginning and read all the words on a page until you reach the end. When you first visit a Web site you are often somewhere in the middle and very rarely do we read all the words.

Actually a Web site is read more like a magazine or newspaper than a book or report. But as we’ll see further on, Web sites are still very different from a magazine or newspaper.

How people read Web sites

Most of the time when visiting a Web site we are trying to find some information, like how much it’s going to cost to post the book we’ve just sold on Amazon. This is where Web sites start to become different from a magazine, where we read articles because they are interesting. Some Web sites actually contain articles too, but here we are talking about general Web sites.

As people are looking for information, they just scan through the text until they find a pointer (a word or phrase) to the information. So most of the words you write about your product, feature or service never get read as people are just looking for key words or phrases.

Writing Web site content for the way people read it

Now that we know how people read Web sites we can start to make sure the way we write helps people to find what they are looking for. Some of the ways we can do this are by:

• highlighting key words and phrases,
• meaningful titles and headings,
• concise text and short paragraphs,
• conversational style,
• bulleted lists and numbered steps,
• an inverted pyramid

Valuable content

The most valuable thing on most small business Web sites is to give customers and potential customers information about the business and what it does. Probably the most valuable pieces of content you can include are:

• What do you do (e.g. Web site design, selling flowers),
• Information about your product/s or service/s,
• How to contact you.

You could also use your Web site to add value for your customers providing them with additional support. If you included an FAQ section, it gives your customers answers to common questions when they want them. It also stops you from answering the same question time and again.

Another way of adding valuable content is by including useful articles and information for your customers related to your products and services. This blog is here to help promote my services, but also to provide useful content to keep people coming back and to tell their friends about.

Valuable content can also help your position in search engines. Creating useful content encourages other people to link to your site, making it look more important to search engines.

Keep adding fresh content

Just creating a site with valuable content that never changes will not keep people coming back.

Think for about TV, if your favourite program was on you would probably watch it. Now what if all it ever showed was the same episode over and over and never showed anything else? How many times can you watch the same episode of Top Gear on Dave?

The same is true of a Web site, no matter how good the information. If it never changes people will get bored and stop visiting it.

Some of the fresh content you can add to your site are:

• Articles and features,
• News (e.g. new products or services),
• Special offers (e.g. deal of the week),

Without valuable content people have no reason to visit your site again or recommend it to their friends. So whether you update your site everyday or just once in a blue moon make sure you have valuable content.

The best content is information about your products and/or services, after all that is what your Web site is there to promote.