Keep your text simple, concise and to the point
No one likes to wade through pages of poorly written, long-winded website content. It's time consuming, laborious and tiring.
Use these website writing tips to make your web pages a pleasure to read.
Well written website copy is:
- Concise - contain all the relevant information a reader needs.
- Simple - don’t write a thesis, keep it simple for everyone.
- Often summarized – people want to find the facts and find them quickly
- Scannable – the page should be easy to find information without the need to actually read entire paragraphs. Bullet points and bold titles help make a page easy to scan.
- Objective - factual, leave the opinions and overly descriptive text out.
- Accurate, helpful, useful – that’s the purpose of having a website. Text that is written that talks about something for the sake of filling a page isn’t very helpful.
- Interesting – Are you sure your readers will want to hear what you are about to say? Maybe your website only really needs 4 pages instead of 8. Only offer useful information.
Try to avoid:
- Embellishing - too much text like this sentence I am writing now seems to just go on and on for the sake of filling a page up like those book reports you used to have to write as a kid back in high school.
- Rambling – One you’ve made a point, go on to the next main point, no need to rephrase the point again and talk about writing really long sentences, because if you read the previous point you’ll be really sick and tired about seeing stuff about embellishing again. ;)
- Using jargon – some readers are novices, so be sure to write in a way that involves all readers.
Keep it simple for fast user scanning
Most users scan website text rather than carefully reading it. They look for points of interest and navigate accordingly. Users value concise, well-written website content, which gives an impression of cohesion and is a a pleasure to read. The first page of this document is an example of a useful page that is quick to the point, factual and easy to scan.
Limit the length of your online pages
Always keep your readers in mind when writing for the web:
- Users do not like long, scrolling pages - they prefer the text to be short and to the point
