What’s up with Content?!?

Posted by Paula Ballak on Friday, January 30.

Hey there—well, here’s my first attempt at blogging for Insight… I can’t tell you how great it is being part of such a fun and hardworking team!

Being the “Queen of Content”, I’ve chosen CONTENT as my first blog topic. Ironically, I must recommend that you read every word in this blog, so that you can find out why you, or your customers, won’t read very many words on any website. But wait, you can do something about that!

From what I can tell, there are at least twelve billion web pages out there. Twelve billion voices talking, but mostly saying nothing. If even just 1% of those pages used concise and effective web writing, the world would be a better place.

“Letting Go of the Words” is a great book written by Janice (Ginny) Redish, and it has a lot to say about the principals of web writing. On the web, we usually want to grab information and use it quickly. We go to the web to get answers to questions or to complete tasks to gather information, reading only what we need. We are all too busy to read much on the web.

I hope the following tips help you to understand how and why I write content the way I do—for your websites. I also hope this helps when trying to decide what information and how much information should go on your website.

Enjoy !! and see you next time… when I may tackle the subject of ‘meta tags’ !!!

Scanning for the Facts

Even though you’ve worked really hard develop a good web page, most people won’t read everything on it.

They scan: They look for headlines, summaries and captions.

After they find what they want they may read it, or they may consider their scan to be adequate, or they may quit – finding it too overwhelming to spend any more time reading.

Short Concise Sentences

Since most people don’t read everything on the page, it’s important to make sure they can find what they need. If your page/document is long, with long drawn out paragraphs, they either won’t easily find what they want, or they’ll give up and you’ve lost your opportunity to share your ideas and information.

Write short sentences. Write short paragraphs. Typically one to three sentences is about all you’ll want to include in each online paragraph.

Simply Put

Most of us prefer simple language. We want information that is easy to understand.

I have quickly learned to befriend my grammar tool bar. If it says your sentences are passive, learn what that means and how to correct it. If the writing is at the 12th grade level and you’re writing for the general public, learn how to make your writing more understandable.

Many web writing books tell you to write information at a sixth grade level. While web content may not need to be at that level, we should try for about the 8th grade, which is often the reading level newspapers aim for. It will most likely be understandable by the widest audience.

Some Friendly Conversation

People interact with their computer and the content on web pages. Most have come to expect the writing on web pages to be more personal than what they read in print.

One way to do this is to insert “we” or “our” where you normally would say “the company” or “the department”. I also try to use the word “you” whenever possible.

For example, instead of: The Security Department safety program helps Kitchener citizens learn how to keep their homes secure. I would write more like this: Our safety program helps you learn how to keep your home secure.

---

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.