It's easy to hold some romantic notion that someone's going to brew up a mug of coffee, curl up with their laptop on the couch, and browse your web site for a while. Trust me here - that never actually happens (except in commercials). If people are visiting your site, they're there for a reason. As much care and love as we might put into crafting captivating copy, the honest truth is that most visitors won't actually read it. In reality, they'll probably scan it for a second or two to see if it's what they're looking for, and move on if it's not.
But that doesn't let you off the hook - in fact, it means that your writing must be even more concise, organized, and hierarchical than usual. I want you to remember back to 4th grade, when you first learned to write essays. I can hear it now: "Intro, Body, and Conclusion." Dust off that phrase and hum it like a mantra while you're writing your web copy. Start by creating outlines - for each page and every paragraph within that page. Intro... Body... Conclusion... Now summarize the page content within the first paragraph. Now go back to each paragraph and summarize its content of within the first sentence. You're almost done. Now go a step further and give your paragraphs a subheading (or group paragraphs together under one heading if it's starting to look messy).
Finally, don't tire reader's eyes with small type, brash color combinations and wide columns. While we're at it, let's touch on font choices. While the conventional print wisdom is that serif fonts make more distinguishable word shapes, and are thus easier to read, a notable font-readability study (Web Marketing Today, 2001) found that web readers tend to prefer sans-serif fonts. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and others have done a lot of work over the last decade to optimize screen readability for many of their popular fonts, but remember this golden rule: you can specify any font for a web page, but people will only see the fonts that they have installed on their computer. For this reason, I usually recommend Verdana or Arial, as boring as those choices might seem.
Web Marketing Today. (2001, March 1). HTML E-Mail: Text Font Readability Study. Retrieved May 9, 2007, from Web Marketing Today: http://www.webmarketingtoday.com/wmt6/html-email-fonts.htm
About the Author
Dan Wilson is a marketing consultant who has been helping companies reach the next level through their communications efforts for over 14 years. Dan's passion for helping clients achieve their goals has led to many successful campaign launches for Fortune 1000 companies. Dan also served for several years on the program advisory panel for UC Davis Extension, developing course curriculum for and teaching web design and multimedia courses. Dan holds an AA in Art and a BS in Business Marketing, and is a Principal and Founder of MarketDifference Communications Group, a brand development and marketing communications firm based in the Sierra Foothills.
