Clarity is Everything! 

Website visitors are busy people. 

Applying good great formatting is essential so that your visitors' urgent quest for information is met.

Unlike paper documents, the tendency of internet readers is to 'snatch' information quickly and in small bits at a time. 

You need to get your point across quickly, by placing your most important message toward the top of the document.

The internet provides visitors with virtually unlimited volumes of information without their having to leave their desks.  Perhaps this is part of the reason they feel compelled to assess the value of a page quickly and move along smartly — if this website doesn’t come up with the goods quickly there are plenty more!

Inverted-pyramid shaped writing, where information is ‘front-loaded’ and less valuable copy follows later, is not a new development — newspaper editors have been doing it for many years.  But it’s not always practiced in business writing or on the internet, and it needs to be.

Internet Readers Scan for Information

The study also illustrates where the 'prime real estate’ on web pages — attention website editors!





www.useit.com/eyetracking

Breaking Information into Usable Bits

Understanding and catering for the urgency and decisiveness of website visitors will assist you to plan and structure your information better.  Use ‘chunks’ of information under appropriate sub-headings that give visitors a queue as to what they can expect from following content.

Website readers recoil at being confronted with large blocks of text much as horses do when faced with a jump they judge too high.

Clearly this is not what you want.  Avoid this by breaking blocks of text into well-labeled ‘chunks’ that your reader can access quickly and assimilate easily.

Beware of Bullet Points!

Bullet points are double-edged swords, if that makes any sense.  Used judiciously, they can add clarity and meaning. But too often they are used to excess, resulting in:

• Lost hierarchy where major points are ‘lost’ among far less important ones

• Visual boredom when readers are met with page after page of bulleted points.

I consider this an appropriate use of bullet points; they contribute to the point being made.

Some insight on visitor’s reaction to bullet points may be extracted from the eyetracking study above.  Did the reader tire of the second set of bullet points? Perhaps so.

All too frequently, otherwise valuable web content is presented within a random spray of bulleted points. 

Death-by-bullet point is highly undesirable.   Remember too that it’s probably your website that won’t survive — the visitor will remain alive and well, perhaps having escaped to another website!

Words and Language

Using long words that we seldom hear is not the hallmark of an accomplished website editor!

In general terms, we read and understand words we hear most often.   So using ‘conversational’ language is a good idea.  The nature of your audience will impact on what is 'conversational' and what is not.

A pitfall for website owners who are writing their own websites using terminology they use around the office or factory.  In the workplace, use of technical terms and acronyms is commonplace. 

However, take extreme care here.  You need to step back into your visitor’s shoes to understand that your words may not be theirs.

Not everyone knows that a GUI (‘gooey’) refers to a Graphic User Interface!  To them its probably called a 'screen' — not technically correct perhaps, but that's probably what they'll call it. 

Words that are ‘conversational’ to you and your colleagues, may not be to your audience.

Using Space

Reading online is more tiring than relaxing with your favourite magazine in the sunroom!

Using visual space is one way of making the task easier for your reader.

One of the greatest advantages in publishing on the internet is the saving in paper.  So because space is so cheap, you should take advantage of its easy availability!

Separate your text to make it easy on your reader’s eye.

This goes for sentences too.  Beware.  Many Content Management Systems default to only one space between sentences.

On the internet, you need two.  Add the second line space manually so that your sentences are not jammed together like sardines in a can, making it tiring for your readers to snatch valuable content.