Writing for the web really IS different.
Why? Well, if you’re writing a children’s storybook, you know exactly who to write for – children. If you’re writing an instructional manual for a piece of lab equipment, you also know the audience you’re writing for – people using that equipment in the lab.
And, because you know the audiences, you can tailor your writing to suit. In language, tone, vocabulary, syntax and the development of concepts, you can write for that particular audience.
But if you’re writing for a website, who makes up the audience? Isn’t it everyone? After all, on an external website literally anyone can come and read the content….
This style of thinking is very pervasive. How many times have you heard someone say to you: “just put it up on the website”, where ‘it’ might be anything from a major report to a job ad? They’re not thinking at all about the readers, just the content that needs to be placed on the site.
But the moment you stop thinking about your audience – yes, even on a web site – is the moment you start to lose readers.
The first step is to stop regarding your website’s readers as an amorphous mass. Think of them instead as discrete, multiple audiences – each with distinctive characteristics.
Every website has readers than can be split up into different audiences. Even a website that attempts to cater for most of the Australian population – think of something like the Medicare website – can still be analysed in this way. So, keeping with the Medicare example for a moment, you might define some of the different audiences as: “those who have lost their Medicare card”, “those looking for a job at Medicare”, “those wanting to know the history of Medicare” – and so on.
So rather than thinking of the fact that anyone can read your material on the website, start thinking of the different audiences you want to address.
Making this easier is that all audiences of content-based websites have certain common characteristics. For example:
- Most people who visit your website stay less than 10 seconds and never return
- Most people who visit your website do not enter through the home page
These two points have huge implications.
You must organise your material so that it grabs the attention of the reader almost instantly; unlike in a book or magazine (where the reader who is bored simply turns the page… so staying within the publication), on a website they’ll click through to another website – and you’ve just lost them. Does the writing you’re doing for a webpage work within a sub-10 second scan? Or even just a few seconds?
If you’re thinking’ “that’s impossible, my material is complex and detailed… there’s no way I can make anyone understand any of it in less than 10 seconds”, you’re not alone.
The trick is to break the material down into a number of levels of complexity. For example, with a complex report (you know, the one you’ve just been told to stick up as a pdf!), you could present the material in six different layers:
- individual fast facts boxes (that is, interesting one line points)
- dot-points summary (say four key points)
- six paragraph press release
- video interview with author
- executive summary
- full report as pdf download
If your audience can easily navigate between the layers, and they’re told there are more and less complex versions readily available, the uptake of the information will be vastly improved.
And remember how most people don’t enter your website through the home page? The implications of that is that the site navigation must be excellent on every web page, and that it makes sense to have references to your most important material appearing in lots of places (eg an on-screen ‘ad’ for your most newsworthy information – the ‘ad’ appearing on every web page).
So the next time you have to do some web writing, think about: the discrete audience for whom you are writing, whether you will grab people in less than 10 seconds, and whether someone coming directly to your page will have the context to understand what you’re on about.
A one-day course by Julian in Writing for the Web is available through Acorn Training and Consulting.
Filed under: Articles on preparing web content
