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Friendly Persuasion

sound familiar?

John was happy with the design and functionality of his website. But prospects were losing interest after browsing only a few pages. He suspected that the copy, which had been lifted from numerous brochures, whitepapers and presentations, was simply too complex and detailed to engage the audience. He called Creative-Ops.

Our experienced copywriters quickly restructured information, chunking it as necessary, to allow visitors faster access to key features and benefits. We pumped new life into tired words and translated techno-jargon into plain old English. Web analytics soon proved that visitors were staying longer.

Writing for the web

The web is a different animal when it comes to writing copy. Advertising copy seldom provides enough detail. Brochure copy drags on, assuming the audience will follow a linear progression of information. While public relations copy forgets to sell.

If you're having Creative-Ops redesign your website, you should probably also consider having it rewritten by our writing staff.

At Creative-Ops, we believe that there are three main guidelines for writing effectively for the Web:

  • Be succinct: write no more than 50% of the text you would have used in a hardcopy publication
  • Write for scannability: don't require users to read long continuous blocks of text
  • Use hypertext to split up long information into multiple pages

Short and sweet

Reading from computer screens is about 25% slower than reading from paper. Even users who don't know this usually express that they feel unpleasant when reading online text. As a result, people don't want to read a lot of text from computer screens. In general, at Creative-Ops we strive to write 50% less text to improve readability. We also know that users don't like to scroll: one more reason to keep pages short.

Scannability

Because it is so painful to read text on computer screens and because the online experience seems to foster some amount of impatience, users tend not to read streams of text fully. Instead, users scan text and pick out keywords, sentences, and paragraphs of interest while skipping over those parts of the text they care less about. To take advantage of this fact, Creative-Ops' writers:

  • Structure articles with two or even three levels of headlines (a general page heading plus subheads - and sub-sub-heads when appropriate). Nested headings also facilitate access for blind users with screenreaders
  • Use meaningful rather than "cute" headings (i.e., reading a heading should tell the user what the page or section is about)
  • Use highlighting and emphasis to make important words catch the user's eye. Colored text can also be used for emphasis, and hypertext anchors stand out by virtue of being blue and underlined

Hypertext Structure

Make text short without sacrificing depth of content by splitting the information up into multiple coherent chunks connected by hypertext links. Each page can be brief and yet the full hyperspace can contain much more information than would be feasible in a printed article.

Long and detailed background information can be relegated to secondary pages; similarly, information of interest to a minority of readers can be made available through a link without penalizing those readers who don't want it.

Each hypertext page should be written according to the "inverse pyramid" principle and start with a short conclusion so that users can get the gist of the page even if they don't read all of it.

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