Nottingham Web Designers Blog

Writing Better Website Content - 5 Tips

Published in Website Design for Small Business on Sunday, 11 January 2009 by MHL | Post RSS

1. Understand Your Audience

Your visitors are vitally important - without them your website would have no purpose whatsoever.

If you haven't done so already, it may be useful to consider some of the following questions - and perhaps before you begin writing your copy.

Who will be looking at your website? Who are you communicating with?
Are you catering to all of them or just a select group (e.g high income earners)?
Why will they be looking and what will they be trying to achieve?
How will they have found it? From an address on your business card? A magazine advert? From searching on Google?
Will your visitors be a particular age? What area are they from? What are their hobbies and interests likely to be? What are their goals and aspirations?
What questions will they be asking?

Now that we have a clearer idea about what your goals are and of who your audience comprises.

Now's the time to start writing. So where should we begin?

2. Clarify Your Goal(s)

What do you want your writing to achieve?

Your copy for a blog post would most likely be different from that of a sales page

7 Goals for Website Writing

Creating / encouraging enquiries & sales (e.g. product page)
Informing the reader (e.g. news or article)
Collecting data (e.g. newsletter / contact us page)
Entertaining the reader (e.g. blog)
Building or inspiring trust (e.g. about us page)
Establishing credibility (e.g. memberships / associations page)
Building your brand (e.g. 'our clients' page)

3. Powerful Headlines

Without a powerful headline, the rest of your copy will remain unread.

A good headline sparks the readers attention / interest - naturally leading them into the rest of your prose.

Professional journalists are well practiced in the art of creating effective headlines. Most agree that the primary objective is to give the potential reader 'a reason to read the rest'.

This is even MORE important when writing website content. Why?

Compared to print on paper, web pages can be painful to read (see the next point). It's all to easy to get distracted, click away on a whim, or simply get bored and move on.

Journalists frequently refer to the acronym AIDA: Attention. Interest. Desire. Action. You'll want to stimulate most of these too. But how?

Always be thinking in terms of the reader. In particular:

What's the hook?
What are the benefits?
Always ask - "What's in it for me?"

4. Easy Reading

Mostpeople find reading from a screen far more tiring than reading from pages of newspaper, leaflet or book.

Every sentence is a chance to lose the reader's interest.

If they don't understand what you're saying, they'll lose interest
If they have to search around for information, they'll lose interest

How can we avoid this?

Keep your writing concise and to the point.
Make sure you're speaking to the right audience and addressing relevant questions (see point 2)
Talk about benefits - from the viewpoint of the reader
Avoid jargon whenever possible. If not, explain it.

Even the shape of your writing can create interest or boredom in the reader.

Wherever possible stay away from dull square blocks of text. Rather split your content up into chunks using:

Short paragraphs and punchy sentences
Sub-headings
Bullet points and numbered lists
Quotes, indents and interesting images

Finally, take care to avoid spelling and gramatical errors. You won't be applauded for getting it correct. But you will be disadvantaged in various ways for getting it wrong!

It probably creates the wrong image for your company.

But research also shows that errors such as these DISTRACT the reader by diverting their attention AWAY from WHAT you are saying to 'unimportant' matters such as spelling & presentation

5. Conscise. Scannable. Objective.

Research has shown time and time again that the most effective wording has 3 qualities that users respond to:

It's conscise
It's scannable
It's objective

Conscise

Typically, your users will be looking for information - be it pricing, product info or company contact details. And they want to find this information as quickly as possible. Remember the boredom threshold.

On the web it's all to easy to click away and look elsewhere.

Scannable

Rather than read through lengthy paragraphs, users want to be able to quickly SCAN your pages to locate the informaton they need.

Good use of subheadings, lists and images can assist greatly in this.

Objective

People are inherently suspicious of the world wide web and are wary of being conned. They frequently compare websites and judge these on the quality of information they offer.

It's important to provide as much independent and objective information wherever possible. For example customer reviews on www.amazon.co.uk or www.morecomputers.com . (Though some doubt how objective these reviews are!)

Products should include objective specifications if possible and include a number of different images so that users can get 'a feel' for what the product would be like to own.

The advantage of using images is that users feel that they are making their own independent judgement about what they see.

They are not being sold to, rather you are providing them with objective information from which they can make the decision to buy if they wish.