Tag Archives: writing for the web

Experts to Inspire You

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We like to keep ourselves up to date with the latest developments in the web industry by reading. A lot.

We read books, articles, websites and blogs and thought we’d pick some of the quotes we really, really like. Hopefully you can spot why…

Usability

“When I look at a web page it should be self-evident. Obvious. Self-explanatory.

“I should be able to ‘get it’ – what it is and how to use it- without expending any effort thinking about it.”

Steve Krug
Don’t make me think

“It is very important that your website is visually pleasing. However it is much more important your website is useful.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

Your content is important

“Language is at the heart of communication, and the only purpose of a website is to communicate.”

Seth Godin
The First Rule of Web Design

“Your writing is important. At the end of the day, you’re a person communicating with other people.”

Nicole Fenton and Kate Kiefer Lee
Nicely said. Writing for the web with style and purpose

“If the heading is the hook, the summary is the line that pulls you in. The summary gives readers all the information they need to decide whether to read on or not.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

“A person who produces content without understanding the tasks the content needs to support is a dangerous person indeed.”

Gerry McGovern
The Stranger’s Long Neck

“With the limitations of the mobile screen as a guideline and a barrier, you’d naturally have to write differently.

  • You’d get to the point.
  • You’d put the most important information up front.
  • You’d remove all the marketing jargon and fluff.
  • You’d write short declarative sentences.
  • You wouldn’t use a long word when a short one would do.
  • You’d make every word earn its place.

Writing this way isn’t just good for writing for mobile. It’s good writing for everyone.”

Karen McGrane
Content Strategy for Mobile

Going mobile

“Use going mobile as a lens to make all our content better regardless of platform.

“It’s a big chance to create a better user experience by improving the quality of our content. Let’s not waste it.”

Karen McGrane
Content Strategy for Mobile

“The work you do now, to structure content for reuse and get it ready for mobile, is going to also make that content more prepared for wherever the future takes it.

“Considering all the different devices on which your content may be displayed forces you to focus – to take stock of what’s really important and to get rid of things that aren’t.”

Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Content Everywhere

Your messaging

“Messaging is the art of deciding what information or ideas you have that you want to give to – and get from- your users.”

Kristina Halvorson and Melissa Rach
Content Strategy for the Web

“Use the mobile screen’s constraints to help prioritise your primary, secondary and supporting messages.”

Karen McGrane
Content Strategy for Mobile

“You must have an ending to your content that is a call to action. Good web content is always task-focused, and the best ending allows your customers to go about completing their tasks.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

A final thought…

“Today, many websites are damaging the reputation of the organization. Every time someone finds the wrong content or clicks on a broken link, the brand is hurt.”

Gerry McGovern
Killer Web Content

Feel inspired

So, do you feel inspired? And can you tell why we like these quotes?

These experts all advocate good writing practice to improve the website experience for all.

They all absolutely, utterly agree on one thing: content is king.

You don’t have to be a designer or a developer to create a useful, successful website at the University (we’ll do that for you) but you do have to care about your content.

References

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Training our Editors to Think Digital First

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Our Go Mobile programme is the driver for some brand new training to get the University thinking digital first.

Raising the bar

We’re training our web editors to operate the new content management system – T4.

We’ve also invited key site owners to come and learn about managing a site. This includes setting goals for content and best practice in writing for the web.

The first sessions ran on 7 and 8 May for trainees from the:

  • Undergraduate and Postgraduate marketing teams
  • Research Office
  • Institute for Sustainability
  • School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development

Day 1: Writing and Planning Web Content

We want to get our web editors really thinking about their content.

The University doesn’t want a team of content-putter-uppers. It needs digitally savvy writers who understand what their site is for and how to evaluate it.

Day 1 introduces setting a site purpose and how you prioritise content to support it. It was good to be able to try out some exercises we’d picked up at Confab Europe (a content strategy conference).  Even better, our editors seemed to really understand them and could see how they might use them.

“[The] site purpose planning doc was super helpful!”

The session also covers tips for writing web content and introduce a range of tools to help you do this.

“The writing tips I know, but still find hard to put into practice…it was a useful refresher.”

Day 2: T4 Training

Our T4 training day provides an introduction to the Content Management System. It showcases the idea of responsive design and how we’re configuring T4 to support editors to write for a range of devices.

“Having news and staff lists in one place is fantastic.”

Empowering editors

Site editors can more easily influence the design of their content in T4. The first editors are starting a 2-4 week period of supported editing. In this time they’ll get to apply new layouts, add quality assets, and improve their content for reading online.

It’s a chance to cut words, tighten copy and focus on users.

Initial feedback

As we go, we’re gathering feedback on the training topics, the delivery and the new CMS. We’re in Beta mode at the moment – but hope we’ve got a good starting point. We’ll be improving the training content as we go.

Accessing training

Training is only available to site editors as part of the Go Mobile Programme: we’ll be in touch when it’s your turn!

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FAQs and why we hate them

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We often get asked why we do not want FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) on the University’s websites.

There are lots of reasons: all to do with making our websites work well for the people who use them.

But, why do we reserve such hatred for such a simple page? Read on and I’ll explain.

Old school

Back in the day, you would always see FAQs on websites. They were used as a catch-all section for content that didn’t quite fit elsewhere.

Now websites have evolved, so has our understanding of how people use them.

The good, the bad and the ugly

Good websites base their structures, sections and content on their audience’s needs. They focus on what we call top tasks.

Content should be in the most logical section. It should be labelled clearly so people can find it and complete their task with ease.

FAQ pages are bad.  They dump a jumble of content together in one page. They are often a long list of questions in a random order. Worse, they may not even answer the question that your reader has in mind.

Another nail in the coffin for FAQs, is the very nature of them. Being a question they have useless, repetitive intros like “How do I?” or “Where can I?”

This is ugly, lazy content! Hard to read, understand and scan.

Why ask your audience questions, when they are visiting your website for answers?

They cause duplication

We’ve had examples of sites that had perfectly good sections reflecting their top tasks.

Instead of just adding content to these existing sections, a new FAQ page appears. It duplicates content in other sections.

They are patronising

FAQs talk to you in a really irritating way.

My personal favourite is the “How do I contact you?” FAQ when there is already a contact us section.

They create more work (and mistakes)

When the contact us section is updated, will the Web Editor remember to track down and update the FAQ too? Often not.

They cause confusion

Out of the two contact us sections, which one is correct? The phone number is different…

Messing with Google

Duplicated content problems show up in Google search results.

FAQ content will fight your other content for attention. Google doesn’t know which contact us content is the right one. It might show both, it might show the out of date FAQ, either way, your user isn’t going to be happy.

We’re not alone…

I hope you can start to see why we are not so keen on FAQs. And it’s not just us…

Gov.uk is stripping away all the FAQs it comes across for the same reasons I’ve just highlighted.

One of our favourite authors about all things web, Gerry McGovern writes about FAQs and really makes you question their worth.

How to avoid using FAQs

If people are repeatedly asking you the same questions:

  • make sure your web content is up to date and signposted well
  • add new content if you are missing information
  • review your top tasks, you may need a new one

Take a look

Next time you see a FAQ page on a website – take a real hard look, with my points in mind. Bet you start to cringe now too…

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How Micro Content Can Immediately Improve Your Website

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Micro content isn’t teeny tiny type on a page – it’s actually the words we put on websites for things like buttons, tabs, menus, even page titles.

Recently we looked at the micro content we used on the 404 error page for the Postgraduate (PG) website.

Our analytics showed some people who followed a broken link (a deleted page) arrived at this error page and then immediately left the website.

Okay, so those people didn’t find the page they were looking for, but we follow best practice on our error page. We very politely give helpful links to the search, homepage and sitemap so people can still try to find what they are looking for.

So why did they leave immediately?

Review micro content

A quick review of the error page micro content revealed it was perhaps a bit negative:

Our old, negative, 404 error pageOur loud and proud micro content at the beginning of the page, didn’t encourage people to read further and use the links we had so helpfully provided.

The page was also a tad long to scan read so we changed it to:

Our new, confident and friendly, 404 error pageBy changing the micro content, we also made the error page follow the confident but friendly PG tone of voice the rest of the website uses.

Testing 1 2 3

We had several versions of the new error page, and ran these past a few people. The feedback resulted in a mashup of the different versions. Overall it’s a page that everyone felt works better.

Outstanding results

We added Google Analytics to the error page so we could tell if/when people started using the links instead and staying on the website… we had a brilliant results.

People stayed on the PG website – and six actually went on to start the application process!

So potentially, six new postgraduate students gained by changing micro content – that’s powerful stuff.

Take a look at the micro content on your website – is it saying what it needs to in the most effective way?

Have a go! What improvements can you make to your micro content?

Read more

This short but effective article, The first rule of web design by Seth Godin is worth a look. Its about making sure you use the right micro content for actions on your webpages – it certainly makes you think.

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Improve Your Content with Help from Hemingway

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Hemingway Editor is a great tool for anyone who writes anything. It allows you to assess the readability of your writing before unleashing it on an audience.

How it works

You can paste in a section of text and it will give you a readability score. This tells you how difficult your words are to read – the higher the score, the more difficult it is. Hemingway uses a grade level to do this which is based on the level of education needed to read your text. If you can get your score under 10 you’re doing well.

The most useful part of this tool, particularly for those not confident with writing for the web, comes in the analysis of your text. The app will:

  • highlight sentences that are difficult or very difficult to read
  • identify the use of the passive voice and adverbs
  • highlight complex words and suggest simpler words or phrases

There are other tools out there that do a similar job. For example, on my own blog I have the Jetpack plugin installed which uses After the Deadline to check spelling and grammar. It works in a similar way to Hemingway App by highlighting complex sentences and use of the passive voice.

Hemingway Editor

The Hemingway analysis of this post

Hemingway beta

The new Hemingway, currently in beta, gives you the ability to format your text with basic styles. You can add headings, bulleted lists, bold and links. If you copy this text to another piece of software, like T4 or WordPress, the formatting is copied too.

Concluding remarks

We use this tool a lot within the Corporate Web team when producing copy for the website. It’s an easy way to check how readable your words are, putting your visitors in a better position to understand your message.

Try it out on some text from your website and see what small changes you can make to improve your writing. My greatest achievement is getting some text down from grade 41 (yes, you read that right) to grade 10. See how you get on.

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