Writing for the Web: A Few Tips

In most cases, a visitor is on your web site because of the content you have to offer, not because they heard that the navigation structure and page layout is amazing. Why, then, is there considerably less time spent (if any) thinking about content during web site design projects?

In the last virtual seminar hosted by User Interface Engineering (UIE), web usability and content expert Ginny Redish provided some useful tips on how to effectively write and structure your web content. In this post, I want to highlight and expand on some of the important points from the seminar.

Don't hog the conversation.
Respect people's time, especially if yours is a heavily task-based site. People are coming to your site in order to answer a question, or complete a task. Long overblown flash introductions and long paragraphs of rambling text are two examples of things web users generally don't care about. Leave them off your site unless there's a compelling reason to have them.

Hold the fluff until your visitors are ready for it.
Get directly to answering the question that is probably in the user's mind. There's a time and a place for marketing fluff and specific jargon - when you know you're speaking to a very specific audience. If you're not, the fluff and jargon can become confusing and distracting. According to Redish, "you market best after you have satisfied your site visitor's needs."

Write to your site visitors.
Think about you site's potential visitors, some possible scenarios, and how they want to see and read content on your site. Use the words your visitors might use. Site designers tend to overestimate the words their readers know.

Cut! Cut! Cut!
Look at your web content and get rid of half of it. It's probably fluff and jargon. That might be a stretch, but you know what I mean. Think of simpler and quicker ways to say what you need to say. People are much less patient readers on the web - they want concise, actionable content that will help them get to where they want to go.

Conclusion/Note
Writing for the web is just one of many areas of focus in the grand scheme of content strategy. A List Apart often puts out great articles relating to the various aspects of content strategy - so keep up with them: http://alistapart.com/topics/content/

Additionally, the folks at Brain Traffic seem to know a thing or two about content strategy.
Update (10/23/09): I've followed up on this post with some tips on Creating Usable Content