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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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The difference between word for paper and words for web sites 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 was talking to someone the other day who might want me to run some copywriting workshops for people in his marketing team. We were talking about the different types of media that his staff write for. When I asked him if they write for the web he said 'no'. But when I asked him who did he said that they just give the words written for brochures to a technical person who publishes them on the web site. So I had a look at the web site - and this is a huge, expensive web site from a major UK company - and there it was: brochure text, published on the web with no changes made at all. Every word was the same and there was no web-friendly formatting. The next day I was searching online for details about a piece of electronic music equipment I am thinking of buying. (Yet another one!) I found it for sale on several web sites. Each one had taken the text from the manufacturer's web site (which itself was probably taken from a brochure) and then simply published it on their pages. In almost every case, there had been no effort to edit the text to make it easy to read on screen. On one site, text had been published as one long block of words with no paragraph breaks. Even the subheadings from the original brochure were simply included as body text. It meant there was a single 359-word paragraph of technical information to wade through. That's just lazy marketing. So what's the answer? Quite apart from issues such as including key words for search engines to find , there is a little work to do when taking text written for paper documents and publishing it on the web. You really should do this because reading on screen is harder than reading on paper. Do it also because web site visitors are an impatient breed who probably won't make an effort to read anything that's confusing. Here are five of the things you really need to do before paper text can be published online: 1. Make the paragraphs short. As a rule of thumb, there should be a new paragraph on average after every 40-70 words. Long paragraphs are a nightmare to read on screen. 2. Use subheadings after every few paragraphs. Use subheadings to help readers find the information they are looking for and to 'break up' long sections of text. 3. Make the language easier to read. This one is hard to be precise about, but as we know that reading on screen is generally harder that reading on paper, it makes sense to improve readability by using shorter sentences, less jargon and so on. 4. Use emboldening Paragraph after paragraph of identically-formatted text is not reader-friendly. Using emboldening of selected words or sentences can help more than you might realise. One of the best ideas is to embolden the first sentence of each paragraph. This technique works well but needs a bit of practise to get right. I have written a short article on how to do it. If you'd like a copy send me an email with 'web article' as the subject and I'll send it to you. And finally . . . 5. Make sure the font size is big enough. This isn't entirely linked to publishing text originally written for print, but it's so important I thought I should raise it. I am often amazed at the tiny text on many web sites. Last week I visited the site of a big local web design agency and the text was so small I could hardly read it. I literally had to press my nose up against the screen. Changing the 'view text size' option in my web browser didn't improve things, probably because the text was published as part of a 'Flash' page. (Don't you just love 'Flash'?) Use your common sense: view your web page on a number of different PCs and increase the size until it's easily readable on all of them. This is becoming even more important due to web accessibility rules and regulations. As I mentioned earlier, good web writing also means including key words in the text, as well as adding metadata behind the scenes. It also means adding appropriate links and writing great headlines. But even if you were to just follow the simple tips in my list of five above you would make your site's text a whole lot easier for visitors to read - and hopefully more of them would take the action you want from them too. Organisations spend thousands of pounds hiring snowboarding web designers to build fantastic sites with great graphics and great functionality. But often they spend nothing on the most important thing of all: great content. For a fraction of the cost of running a web site you could probably use internal or external resources to make sure the content works just as hard as the rest of the site. Copyright 2005 Richard Groom |