As a copywriter, I spend a fair amount of time creating content for websites. And in the process, I also educate clients about the right way to write for the web.
The temptation—and it looms large—is to tell site visitors everything about what your company does and why it’s a such a wonderful organization. Giving in leads to big, cluttered pages and a lot of below-the-fold content that never gets read.
The horrible truth is that when someone lands on your home page, you’ve got about 8 seconds to grab their attention. Given our incredibly fast-moving lives and need to digest heaps of information every day, that figure will probably get even smaller.
What’s an honest business person to do? Well, it’s helpful to view your site as a Scheherazade. Tell all, and your visitor decamps to another site (the moral equivalent of losing your head).
You want to make your copy concise, credible, and relevant. Jakob Nielsen, who has been referred to as “the king of usability,” notes that only 79% of people actually read web pages. Instead, they scan them, searching for key words and ideas. The longer and more hype-y content is, the less likely they are to hang around.
More about writing for the web in my next post. But I must hasten. The king is calling.
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