Web users are lazy and impatient – think of yourself when you’re waiting for a site to download that takes a few seconds longer than you expect! That means that web copy needs to get the message across FAST.

The very first thing that your web visitor will look at is the headline – it needs to reassure the website visitor that the site will deliver the information they were looking for. If it doesn’t (or it’s hard to find) they’re gone!

Then there’s the web copy that you want to get your reader engaged – and this where the ‘line’ appears. Do you write creative copy that gets the reader involved and ‘draws the picture’ of what it could be like for them to own your product or experience your services? Or do you write focused, sharp copy that tells them the facts and gets to the point quickly and clearly?

What a dilemma – what sort of web copy works best? There’s a case for both – and there’s some other issues that need to be taken into account; people read headlines, but don’t read all the copy – they scan it. That means you have to be very clever with your web copy.

The formula I use is to:

Taking into account that they’ll be scanning through this, draw their attention to key words. This may not be the ones they’ve searched on necessarily, but the ones that are emotionally charged, for instance in an ad for garden design:

You can add a room to your home by turning your garden into an area you use more and get more pleasure with less effort.

or

When the sun shines do you look at your garden and wish you could sit out and enjoy it instead of slaving over a mountain of weeds? A good design can take the work away and create a garden you can enjoy.

If you’re scanning down the web copy – the bold words stand out and your core message is clear. You can make your web copy walk the line if you’re smart – just don’t overdo it.

It doesn’t only work on web copy; it works on your paper documents too!
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When you launch your shiny new website do you test it to find out if it works for the reader?

Ask a selection of customers, suppliers and associates to test it out for you and give you feedback.

Ask them to:

Then you might also ask them:

This feedback is invaluable and your test team don’t have to be experts, in fact, it’s better if they’re not. The less web savvy they are the better ‘real-life’ feedback you’ll get.

Remember the site is for users not designers – don’t be precious, if changes need to be made, then make them! The results will show up in your bottom line!
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1. Headline – needs to be in prime real estate and bigger than anything else to get attention.

2. Simple, easy to use navigation – easy to find, consistent, no overwhelm, no guesswork!

3. Don’t underestimate the power of using the text as hyperlinks to aid navigation too.

4. Content – put your message up front – but in the readers terms of reference. Keep it short, clear, simple and concise.

5. Scanability – most people won’t actually read your copy, so put key information in bullet lists and key words or SHORT phrases in bold to attract attention.

6. Reading for the bots – keywords and phrases need to be repeated 2-4 times – but don’t bend the copy out of shape to accommodate this. Bots are getting quite clever these days and can tell when you’re keyword stuffing.

7. Readability for humans – DON’T use:

8. Fonts – stick to a sans serif font – like Verdana, Arial, Tahoma or Trebuchet. Serif fonts (Times, Palatino, Garamond) are too fussy for the screen resolution to present well.

9. Page layout – keep it clean and simple, avoid 2 column layouts and very wide or very narrow columns of text, put visuals to the right of your copy so they don’t encourage people to skip bits, put things where people expect them to be (ask me if you’re not sure) so they don’t have to stop and think about anything.

10. Tell people what you want them to do and then make it easy for them to do it.
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You’re probably already guessing at lots of things your website should do – and you’re probably right for most of them, but these are my absolute essentials:

# One – have a clear purpose
Most people will say that their website is to make sales – or sometimes as an online brochure, but then a brochure is intended to persuade people to buy, so that’s the same thing. However, you need to be realistic, if you don’t have an ecommerce site, people are probably not able to buy from you online. This means that the purpose actually is for them to ring or email.

# Two – get their attention right away
If people arrive on your website and have to search to see if you’ve got what they want, your website isn’t working. Most people won’t bother making the effort; if it’s not obvious they’ll just go somewhere else!

If you’re paying for your site to be search engine friendly and get traffic, it’s not good news if people take one quick look and leave.

# Three – don’t put obstacles in their way
Make life easy so eliminate anything that will make people work harder than necessary to get your message. How quickly can they see that you’ve got what they want? Are your pages clear or confusing?

Think about your website from the viewer’s perspective – if you know what you want them to do, get their attention and make it easy for them to take action you’ll be way ahead of most of your competitor’s websites!

Have ever watched someone waiting for a web page to download? Do they sit calmly or are their fingers tapping impatiently and a certain amount of muttering and sighing going on if it doesn’t snap onto the screen instantly?

It’s amazing when you think that we all waiting much longer when we were on dial-up – how did we ever achieve anything at all? However, that’s not my point – my point is that we are all impatient; the web has taught us to expect fast results. We want information and we want it now!

The days when you’d go to the local library or get the encyclopaedias out are long gone. You sit in front of the screen and you have access to more information that most of us can possibly want. So, when someone arrives on your website – that’s the frame of mind they’re in: Impatient!

Take a good look at your own website – how fast does it download (try this on someone else’s computer so you’re not accessing your own cache)? What is the first thing on the page that attracts your attention? Is that your key message? If not, why not?

What are people really looking for when they come to your website? Does the key message answer the question or indicate that the answer is available on this website?

Get a few people to do this for you too – what is their feedback? You know that, unless all the answers are resoundingly positive, you might need to rethink your website.
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I love words – however, as George Bernard Shaw famously said ‘You must learn to murder your children’! Writing lots of lovely words about your company doesn’t work for the reader on the web.

When someone has arrived at your website they are looking for something; they’re either searching for information, or they want to buy something. If you spend their valuable time blinding them with how wonderful you are, you will lose them fast.

People want action – so tell them what your product or service will do for them and then tell them what to do next. Web copy that doesn’t draw the picture of how my problems will vanish and how lots of fantastic benefits will be mine isn’t doing it’s job.

A web page that doesn’t have a clear call to action is a mortal sin!

Create a clear cut vision of what life will be like with your product or service in place, then give them either another page to get more detail or a phone number and email (or both).

Cut any words that don’t contribute to these two outcomes!

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I’ve talked about headlines and how important they are – then the subject of subheaders came up. So what is a subheader?

It can be:

When you write web copy you want to tell people all about what you do. It’s really important that they understand what you can deliver or they won’t buy what you are offering – right?

Wrong! Nobody is interested in what you do – they’re only interested in what they get. If you review what you’ve written in the past and count the number of time you’ve written ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’ or your company name, then compare it to the number of times you’ve written ‘you’ and ‘your’ in the same piece of web copy – you may get a surprise.

However, this doesn’t mean you can’t tell people what they get – simply that you need to think about how you do it. If you can present your web copy in terms of what that does for them, you’ll still get your message across – in terms that the potential customer wants to read.