Forum Moderators: not2easy
1. Use concise text - sticking to short keyword rich statements that support the theme and present the key information.
2. Use bullet points to emphasize important points
3. White space is your friend
>>I beleive that's called selling!
Being able to manipulate information to your advantage...in this case $ :)
I can totally go with what Nick says about the plumber/professor.....I guess we are slightly crossing over into "who we write for on the web"
Maybe it would be handy for another thread addressing what sort of approach we would use for the different markets when writing on the web :)
> Stick to the same voice throughout the copy.
1) Keep the navigation as short as possible.
2) Keep the information on products as short as you can without missing out important information.
3) Keep the checkout process as short as you can.
With ecommerce, you want that persons credit card number as fast as possible. If you upset or confuse them with long text or long navigation they are more likely to use up your bandwidth and not buy.
I believe the directive not to use "click here" arose from the early, text-heavy days of the web. Connections were slower and browsers primitive (my very first site was designed for delivery to Mosaic and Netscape 0.9b over 14.4K "high speed" connections!). The concept of the hyperlink was new and exciting (remember Gopher?) and you often scanned a long text document looking for the links.
Now imagine a page where every link is labeled "click here." For blue widgets click here, or click here for red widgets. Visually scan this web page for navigation or contextual clues, but all that stands out from the text are blue "click here"'s up and down the page, forcing you to do a closer, slower reading and taking away from the entire point of having a web instead of a tunnel. To some extent, this is still true. In my opinion, good designers avoid repetitive "click here... click here... click here..." or "go there... go there... go there..." chains, especially in body text.
At the same time, the phrase "click here" in and of itself is harmless where used with common sense. Certainly it can be appropriate for buttons and icons, since one major usability problem is the user's ability to distinguish decorative elements from navigational elements.
For myself, I use "click here" in banner ads and some other graphics and in most sites, I use the "action verb" method Grumpus noted for text links.
Not a personal remark, I hasten to add ;) Just a strong opinion on this...
Nick
Who says the user can 'click' anywhere?
True indeed. But if it's part of the graphic, most users who aren't "click"-ing (i.e. those using text-based and voice browsers) won't see it to begin with. :-) The principle still applies if one uses the form "To see more older articles, follow this link [example.com]" instead of "See older articles [example.com]."
My supervisor during my time at university was a stickler for correct usage of english, which is not always my stong point. He used the above example as a famous gramatical error. It should be written "To go boldly....".
I'd say that professor needed to loosen up. It's the speakers and users who create a langauge. Academics come along after the fact and document what the users have created. They look for what seem to be rules in the patterns that the users have created. But the academics are not the creators and their rules don't create the language.
Don't let the stuffy dead rules make our writing turn stuffy and dead. We should know the "rules" for what they are, but we shouldn't be their slave.
A langauge is alive through the creativity and communication needs of those who use it. I think the writers for Star Trek knew that they were breaking a "rule". They broke the "rule" because the sentence sounded better that way. And I say, we should do the same IF it makes a better communication for our purposes.
Winston Churchill (a great speaker and writer) once poked fun at academic grammarians saying "Ending a sentence with a preposition is one thing up with which I will not put."
But the web is built on the hyperlink - an asset we can learn to use well.
Links offer a writer the opportunity to offer MORE information than print, and make all those extras available in drill-down fashion. I've found that making more information available to those who want it is a big help in increasing sales - but it takes a differe mindset for the writer to do this well.
Strong, concise, (and yes, short) "teaser paragraphs" on the main page, with links for those who want to learn more in that area - that's a winning formula. The writer who uses a drill-down style is the writer who has learned something about what makes the web different from print.
Direct mailers know that longer copy usually beats shorter copy in split run tests. The BEST prospects for an offer often want and need as much information as they can get - and you can never know who will want to learn more in what area. The web is a way to offer a wide variety of supporting information even more conveniently than you can in print.
So, yes, any one web page should be short and concise. But a good web writer is no longer thinking in terms of "a" page. And the total amount of information offered can be very full and rich.
Considering that "surfing" is active, unlike television, which is passive, using verbs to describe links can keep people clicking, since surfers are looking for something to do.
Urgency can help, too. In my telemarketing days, I was amazed at the power of the word "Now" when upselling a customer. "The blue widget is available now for 19.95, we'll add that to your red and white widget, okay?" It even helped to stretch the word "now" for a split second longer.
My affiliate sites have benefitted from the use of verbs and urgency. I have found that using "Buy [product] at [affiliate] now" or "Shop for [product] at [affiliate] now" works well in pushing the fence sitters into the affiliate sites better than "[product] at [affiliate]".
It's been my experience that "Read more about blue widgets" or "Blue Widgets Dominate Widget Show" would generate more traffic than the generic "Blue Widgets".
I run an intellectual literature site. Serious articles. Often spend weeks researching and writing a single piece. But we had more response to a downmarket, jokey piece on Marilyn Monroe than anything else we've ever featured.
Therefore I'd say KISS - Keep It Simple Stupid i.e. remember: most web surfers are not terribly intelligent. They don't appreciate quality writing; neither do they care for grammar. Focus on articles about Britney Spears' splitting up with her latest boyfriend (whoever he may be) rather than discussing Plato's philosphy. Most people are dumb. Period.
To see the difference between click here and keyword keyword, just imagine you want information on blue widgets.
Now scroll up the page, then start scrolling down slowly.
Text text text text text text click here.
Text text text text text text, learn more about blue widgets.
So, which link will you click if you want information on blue widgets?
People don't read text unless they find it interesting, they will scan what shines on the page and after that decide whether they will read it. With "click here" shining how many people will get interested?
I am pretty horrible at it personally though.
todd
So, which link will you click if you want information on blue widgets?
Linking a related word to a page about that word is also better for creating themed associations for search engines.
The thing that irritates me most is when ppl write and the lines go all the way across a page.
It irritates me when ppl don't bother to write out entire words =)
Seriously though, what do you mean? Like when people write text documents with no breaks? Or when people use ridiculously long lines by putting them in <table>s or <pre> tags?
I was amazed when I found what the article was about. I originally thought the article title boring and the subject trite but apparently my audience likes VERY BASIC subjects and clear titles. The title was simply, "Are X necessary?"
Something else that I think helped click-thrus was the teaser copy before the link. It began with an engaging little vingette - '... A woman in Piedmont, California was shopping recently for X. She was appalled at what she saw... more' So, a lot of people clicked "more" to get the dirt on what so appalled the woman.
Today's morals -
1) Use crystal clear titles and headers
2) Assume readers know absolutely nothing
3) Write about people not products
I hope that little example is useful.
The same for 50 screen pages.
This yellow is readable: www.thegaryhalbertletter.com.
The problem with the page is that the title is a gif image. And an interlaced one which wastes even more andwidth and I don't like that.
Why?
1) The colours were awful! Bright yellow background? Puhlease! The site really looked like it was put together by some 15 y/o experiementing on their first web site. Compare that with, say, www.jaguar.com/global.html, where it looks like you're dealing with a proper, global corporate.
2) The style of writing screamed out to me "con artist". In fact, I was waiting to be offered a free set of steak knives along with my purchase. His book, or whatever it was that he was selling, apparently fixes your sex life, plus walks the dog, and mows the lawns for you too, plus cures baldness....you get what I mean. I find the style of "selling" on that particular website to be extremely "snake oil-ish".
That's my impression.
Sorry, I can't help it. I just read a little bit through his stuff, and every single sentence he writes just screams LIAR at me. Are there people in this world who really take this kind of nonsense at face value?
You're right, it looks over-flashy, over-fancy, etc. Just like a well known company's site where their webmaster knows that whatever he throws there will be visitors.
We don't want to see that, we want valueable information.
There's a certain type of people who respond to direct mailings, which may react less alergic to Halberts style of writing than I do. The average percentage of their returns seems to be around 3%. My guess would be that if you want your web site to attract some of the remaining 97% of the population, you better reduce the sleaze factor a tiny little bit. Especially so, since the relative number of educated people is significantly higher online.
1) The text is not re-sizeable due to css. On my screen it's a little small to read comfortably at the normal text setting
2) He uses Times Roman as his font. Serif fonts are more difficult to read off the screen than sans serif - apart from Georgia and other specially designed screen fonts.
3) The text is screen-wide, making it hard to read. The optimal width for readable text is much narrower - usually quoted as between 400 and 600 pixels.
4) It looks cheap.
Not very good Mr Halbert. I think.
Cy
Use a large-enough, legible font size
why does everyone love 11px verdana for big blocks of text! it is so exhausting to read
(obviously depends on target audience ;) )
I wonder the same thing. I'm using 13px verdana by default, you can change that if it's still small.
I find 1em or 100% work fine in all circumstances
NEVER set the font size with pixels unless it is for a small sections of non-crucial text that hav eto be precisely aligned with an image
point sizes are for print and print alone, they make no sense for screen display and if they are legible it's entirely by luck
i think em is not very good 'cos it scales very badly when the user controls the font size via the browser
but % is def. way forward. we are in the process of restyling our site and i am playing with % as we speak :)
(was prev. pixel ;)
If more webmasters knew that... I wouldn't be hitting + every time I visit a new site with Opera on Linux. Actually all Unix browsers show points as smaller than the Windows ones.
>i think em is not very good 'cos it scales very badly when the user controls the font size via the browser
Actually em's "should" be the best choice, or at least that's what W3C wanted to do all the time.
