People Don’t Read Your Website… They Scan it.
Make it Easy to Scan your Information, and They’ll consume it.
Anyone writing copy for web needs to understand how to write web copy. The reason is that copy writing for the web determines how and what of what your write actually gets read. If you write to have your copy scanned, then you are writing good web copy!
Headlines
A page’s headline needs to interrupt and be relevant. It does not need to be descriptive, explain or introduce anything. It just needs to stop people and get them to the Sub-Header.
Sub-Headers
A Sub-Header needs to engage a website visitor while expanding on the headline and its relevance to what the subject of the web content.
Image Captions
Following reading the headline and Sub-Header of a page, people will turn briefly to images and then read the image caption. This is why it is so important to write the best image captions possible, as this is what people are reading to determine if going further is going to be a waste of time or not.
Bullets
Write in bullet form;
- As much as possible.
- When appropriate.
- When a paragraph is going to be too large.
- When you want it read.
Paragraphs – short and start bold
Keep your paragraphs short. I suggest 6 lines or less. It really helps to bold the first part of your paragraph (no more than 1/2 of it), and place the most "to the point" copy there.
Use your Colours
Use your website colours as the colours for your headline and Sub-Headers. You don’t have to use the exact colours, but doing this will help your copy stand out a little.
Calls to Action
Calls to Action (what you want people to click on to fill out a form, become a sale or go further in the sales or lead process) should not be copy unless it is also accompanied with button that repeats or expands on the text link.
Perfect Example
Just look at those image captions! This comes from www.eightbyeight.com , the website of an excellent eCommerce optimization company. I have met Amy Africa who is a partner at Eight by Eight and knew I would fine the best practices she and I both advocate.
I hope this helps!
4 Comments Received
April 13th, 2009 @5:22 pm
Great example site to look at. Going to have to re-design mine now… again!
Nicole
April 13th, 2009 @7:37 pm
No worries Nicole. You should have see their site until a few months ago. It was like the mechanic with 3 broken cars
April 13th, 2009 @11:20 pm
Great stuff – however, there is some confusion between a byline, a strapline and a subheading. A byline is ‘by John Doe’, a strapline is the bit that comes after the main brand name like Nike’s ‘Just do it’ and Rentokils ‘It does what it says on the tin’. A subheading expands the headline and builds interest.
There’s a whole lot of other stuff about not just WHAT people read, but HOW people read – and your bullet point suggestion is spot on – people do stop and read lists!
However, designers do not usually understand how people read and, as long as it looks pretty they’re happy – the fact that text is not just one more element in the visual arrangement may not occur to them. They do all sort of awful things to the copy that can make killer copy virtually unreadable:
* reversed out writing
* justified paragraphs
* all caps
* flash animation that doesn’t stop moving
* two column layouts – that people won’t bother to scroll back up to read.
etc. etc.
I’ll get off my soapbox now! If you really want to get the whole story I’ve written a report on Readability which is free. It’s available at www.webcopythatpeopleread.com.
April 14th, 2009 @6:08 pm
Thanks for sorting me out on Byline and Sub-Header. I think I’ve had them mixed up since 1st year Journalism!
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