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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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Avoid these web site mistakes Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. I am busy at the moment writing web site content for two clients. Each time I start a new site, it's an opportunity to put the best principles of web site content into action. So here are five tips that I am following to help us avoid some of the more common web site mistakes. Take a look, and see which of them you need to apply to your own site. 1. Be selective about what goes on your home page. Whether yours is an owner/manager business or a multi-national, the chances are that you offer a wide range of services to clients. So there can be a temptation to feature them all with equal prominence on your web site's home page. But there is a danger that your home page ends up looking messy and confusing. So can you narrow things down to between three and five products or services (or groups of them)? For example, decide who are your five most important customer types and then feature content most relevant to them. 2. Write (and design) for the scan-reader. Research by Stanford-Poynter, Jakob Nielsen & John Morkes and others has shown that most web site visitors scan-read pages. Their eyes dart around the page, looking for relevant information. And incidentally, people usually look at words first, then pictures (if at all) - the opposite of print readers. So make sure you write and format your text in a way that will help scan-readers find what they want. Here are three tips: * Write headlines and summaries that are simple, to-the-point and that describe exactly what follows. * Use tools such as emboldening, colour and indenting to make a screen of text seem more inviting. * Keep paragraphs short - about 70 words maximum in most cases. 3. Remember that some people like to print. There are many reasons why people need to print pages from your site. They might want to take information away to read on the train, or to bring up at a meeting, or simply to keep for future reference. But recently I tried to print a simple page and ended up with six sheets of paper, mostly blank, with the information I wanted missing altogether. There is no excuse for this: set someone the task of printing every page on your web site. If any pages don't print clearly then tell your web designer to make sure they do. 4. Consider the reader. OK, so as a marketer you are probably sick of hearing this one: you have to remember who is reading your site and write from their perspective and knowledge, not your own. But even though this has been said many times, I still see the opposite on many sites. What happens is that you are so familiar with your products, your services, your world, that you forget to consider what the reader knows. I make this mistake sometimes too. So we have to be tough on ourselves: review the content you write to make sure your visitors will understand it and find it relevant. 5. Keep experimenting. The worst thing you can do is create a web site and then leave it there, unchanged for years. Don't dramatically change the look or navigation of the site too often. But do change the headlines, home page features and so on. Keep fine-tuning until you create some pages that your site's visitors find interesting, relevant, easy to read - and that drives them to take whatever action you are hoping for. Copyright 2004 Richard Groom |