Writing for the Web
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Critical Observations
- Your website visitors spend most of their time on other peoples' websites.
- You are not writing a speech to be heard by 1000 people. You are writing a dialogue that occurs with a single person, 1000 times.
- Words alone make up only 10% of communication. (A lot of what you think is coming across really isn’t.)
- People don’t read web pages--they scan.
- When someone arrives at your website, they typically scan the page for 3-7 seconds before they leave.
- When someone arrives at your website, they typically arrive at a page other than your homepage.
- Your visitors came to your website on a mission. Your website’s job isn’t to tell your visitors what to do--it’s to find out what they want and how you can help them. (People don’t like to be sold but they like to buy.)
- Visitors typically scan a Web page in an ‘F’ pattern: two horizontal scans followed by a scan down the left edge of the content.
Guidelines
- Imagine your visitors to be intelligent and impatient.
- Be plainspoken.
- Use the same terminology that the rest of the Web uses. Call your ‘About Us’ page “About Us”, not “Behind the Curtain”.
- Think of jargon as a foreign language. If you want to attract and limit your website to French, then write in French. Otherwise stick with your native tongue.
- Avoid flowery, evocative language and marketese. At best this comes across as white noise. At worst it will offend your visitors and hurt your credibility.
- Be concise.
- Write your content, then reduce the number of words by half.
- Reduce the number of words by half again.
- If this is your first time writing for the web, reduce the number of words by half, AGAIN.
- Write using the inverted pyramid style, like journalists. Put the conclusion first, followed by major details, followed by supporting information. (i.e. Don’t bury the lead.)
- Highlight keywords for scannability by making them bold or making them into links.
- Use bulleted lists for scannability. (Website content has more in common with presentation slides than brochures.)
- Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet points with information-carrying words. Defy your English teacher and use passive voice in these places to make important words scannable.
- Use verbs for link names. (Apple is very good at this.)
- Write actionable content. Visitors are on a mission and tangential stories are a waste of their time.
- Declarative sentences are good. Web readers demand pith.
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I viscerally hate sales letters, all the more because I understand the reasoning behind them and why they often make money. I refer to this as Influence marketing, based on the Cialdini book. Sales letters use a lot of manipulative techniques turned up on high, and this includes their marketese. Sales letters are so confusing, so littered with language that looks like it should make sense but doesn't, that you are virtually bullied into buying the product just to make the noise stop. 10 pages of marketese creates a lot of confusion, which brings on uncertainty and fear. Coupled with 'act now' offers (scarcity, psychological reactance, etc.) it's relatively easy to scare someone into buying.
Yes, these tactics can be profitable, because people are easily bullied and manipulated, especially online where bad usability is the norm. But it's not going to win you happy customers, or loyalty, or any sort of goodwill. I believe that few people recognize when they're being manipulated, but they still feel it. And the very reason I'm doing Web architecture consulting in the first place is to steer people away from these types of tactics.
Good for you. I like your philosophy and ethics. I do think you exaggerate a bit, though, when it comes to "all" sales letters. I've seen the kind you describe, but I've also seen some very well-written ones that are straightforward, and just keep going deeper into the benefits and feature of the product/service. These are the ones that seem to make the money. But I'm just guessing. Keep up the good work!
Agreed, I'm just against sales letters that use overwhelming marketese. Long sales letters that have straightforward, informative content are a step up from the average website (which lacks information and/or is poorly organized) but a step down from a well-structured website. It's a passable compromise if you have an audience that is already committed or you're a bootstrapper architecting the website yourself.
Bruce Elkin 3 years ago
Interesting, and makes good sense. But, what about "sales letters"? The best one's are 10 screens long. How do you make sense out of this? ANd the fact that many of the top marketers don't use website, they use mini-sites that are just long sales letters.
I tend to agree with your points, but all the data I get from marketers says go long.
What say you?