Readability of the Web and Press Releases

I was reviewing a company's press release the other day and the first paragraph was like my momma's Friday casserole: everything included.

It took me awhile just to identify the main ingredients.

When it comes to writing for your website or a press release, this isn't middle school composition class. Try to make each point as quickly as possible. Your sentences should be short and positive. Your paragraphs should include as few of those short, positive sentences as possible.

If you are listing the features of your app, rather than jumbling a paragraph with descriptions of your features, try breaking them out of the sentence and into a bulleted list. People have trained themselves to scan copy for the information they are looking for. Bullets are much more scannable than blocks of text.

One website I wrote that provides an example of writing in short, readable bursts is www.ringomo.com.

Fast websites rank higher among customers, Google

One thing I've always recognized is the impatience of net surfers. I know it because I am one -- and have become even more impatient as the years and technology advances has brought us ever-faster loading times. What I used to tolerate in terms of page loading now will cause me to move on to another site if the one I aimed at is just a wee bit too slow to load.

I'm not alone. Here's a good read on the topic. In this article, it refers to an experiment conducted by Google in which they slowed down the delivery of search results. They found that increasing a page's loading time by less than half a second has a measurably negative impact on searchers. And, the author found, "the customer is highly, highly impatient. They scan a page like they scan a signpost as they're driving down a motorway. They hardly even read full sentences."

Which is why marketers who write the copy for their websites like they do an informational brochure -- heavy with graphics and large blocks of text -- are missing the opportunity. To take the article's author's metaphor a step further, it's like the highway department putting the "how to merge" section of the driver's manual on the sign next to the highway instead of the recognizable symbol for doing the same thing.

Writing for the Web

I'm often asked what distinguishes our web site design services from others. While I see some beautifully designed sites out there, they are usually designed by, well, designers. The copy on the site is usually provided to them by the client and is often the same kind of marketing material that would go in their printed brochures. My answer to them is that our web sites are written for the web, and we follow rules to make sure the site accomplishes its objectives in terms how people read a website and how search engines scan them.

The first thing you need to know is that online readers want their information quick -- they've trained themselves to scan pages for the content they're looking for. They pop from site to site and don't have the patience for reading long paragraphs of text on your site.

Your copy must be both written and organized in such a way to get the readers' attention fast and directing them to the information they want and will help them navigate your site easily.

Keep your sentences and paragraphs as brief as possible. Use headers to help the readers scan, and make them clever enough to compel them to read that section.Put some useful links in the body of your article that can help your reader find both the information they want or the product they want to buy. Like any convenience store, signs and good organization can help people have a rewarding experience -- and get them in and out of there as quickly as they'd like, while lingering long enough to do business with you.

If you link to outside pages, make sure those links open up another window so they're not actually leaving your site! Why on earth would you link somewhere else? Like I mentioned earlier, people are scanners and they want to find useful information. If your site is found to be a resource for useful information -- even if it lies outside the boundaries of your own site -- then people will come back to it.


And, lastly, look for the keywords you know your customers are searching for and be sure they are included a number of times in the body of the text, in headers and in meta tags.

One of the sites I wrote that I think works well is not one we designed at all. Check out www.ringomo.com. Not to brag or anything, but I really like the short bursts of useful text, interesting headers, and good use of links to direct you where you want to go for the right information.