Websites That Inform but Don't Communicate and Websites That Communicate But Don't Inform

In today’s e-commerce, written communication on your website makes the competitive difference in overall organizational success. Customers, clients, and prospective business partners often check out your website before they even phone or fax you. If your words on the website don’t communicate what they need to know or build your credibility, you’ll never get a chance to connect with them by phone or face to face.

Today more than ever, poor writing tempts a customer to click away, doubting that your technology or service is any better than your communication. An e-mail from your customer service staff or a website page with disorganized ideas, convoluted paragraphs, intimidating layout, or grammatically incorrect sentences tells the client that you won’t service their engines well, amortize their mortgage correctly, or interpret their insurance coverage fairly.
Here are a few tips to make writing on your website easier and faster and the results more effective:

Create a “summary” on your home page. Just as with other documents, visitors to your site need an overview of your business and your uniqueness. That summary may be provided in a few headlines, by the labels in the menu, or in a graphic representation. However you do it, the home page should answer these questions: What do you do, and how do you do it? What’s your brand? If you doubt the importance of that summary, ask yourself how many websites you’ve visited after a colleague’s referral, where you couldn’t figure out what the business or organization was all about? The overall purpose of your site (internal information only, external information only, online sales, interactivity to generate traffic, and so forth) will determine what your summary should convey.

Focus on visitor benefits rather than information about your own organization. As usual, the first step in writing anything is to consider your audience: Why should they care about what you have to say? How will they be better off after having visited your site? Talk about problems they have in terms of the help you can provide.

Help visitors stay focused; avoid clutter. Just as you do not want to add irrelevant details to an e-mail, avoid distracting bells and whistles, banners and bulletins on a web page. Irrelevance has the same effect on screen as it has on paper: confusion. Consider this analogy: If you walk into a room with one picture on the wall, chances are great that you’ll notice that picture. If you walk into the same room with 100 pictures on the wall, chances are great that you’ll not notice in any single picture. The same is true of websites.

Position ideas in order of importance in each window of text. Use the descending arrangement. The first sentence of each paragraph or section should tell the story. Details should follow.

Chunk information so people can remember it. Seven is the magic number. Our brains can comprehend only seven or fewer menu items: tasks, subtasks, or bullet points. Anything longer overwhelms us and forces us to reread––if, and that’s a big if––we take the time to linger.

Provide answers to typical questions. What will visitors need to know before they can make the decision you want them to make? Give any dates, deadlines, costs, guarantees, credentials, track record, and helpful how-to’s.

Tell visitors how they can communicate with you. A survey sponsored by Brightware, a Novato, CA, maker of customer-response software, revealed that many Fortune 100 companies (half of those 100 companies surveyed) didn’t have an obvious e-mail link on their websites, and 10 companies had no e-mail link at all. When the same survey was conducted last year, only 15 percent of the companies contacted responded to an e-mail that asked: “What is your corporate headquarters address?” The response times were even more exasperating. A host of companies did not respond within a month!

Use specific words. Many customer complaints center on this one issue: The visitor buyer or inquirer interpreted a vague word or phrase to mean something quite different than the writer intended. With vague, general words, you are setting your visitor up for disappointment.

Forget the technobable. Translate, translate, translate. Write error messages in plain language. Give usable feedback.

Make response easy. Remember that response is voluntary. Website visitors measure their trouble by number of clicks, quantity of clutter, and seconds spent in confusion.

Make copy easy to skim. Put your message in informative headlines. Provide complex or detailed information in list format or in short paragraphs. Add color to highlight key points. And above all, be consistent. That is, express equally important ideas in the same color with the same typeface and size. In short, give visitors control of what they want to read in what order.

Group like items together, based on their function and frequency of use. Consider your website layout like pegs for your garden tools hanging on the garage wall or like mug trees for your coffee cups. Readers must understand the structure of the pegs (pages, bullets, buttons, categories) so they can hang information on them.

Keep visual metaphors consistent. If your site design uses physical health and fitness as a metaphor for organizational fitness, keep that same analogy throughout the site. Whether we’re talking about horses or horoscopes, don’t mix metaphors mid-stream––written or visual.

List menus in logical order. The same advice holds true for websites as it does for written reports. Analyze and plan, then write.

Label menus, buttons, symbols, and graphics. Conventional wisdom claims a picture is worth a thousand words. That’s true––if people understand the picture. Use descriptive rather than general labels.

Don’t trick people. Be honest about what you offer. Do you remember how you feel when you read all the way to the end of a five-page direct-mail piece only to discover the writer’s asking you to send them “only $39.95” for a widget? Tricked. And angry. That’s the same feeling visitors to your website experience when a headline on a form seems to promise them something for free and only after spending five minutes filling out the online form do they discover they’ll be charged for hitting the “submit” button.

Make the copy readable. Prefer sans serif typefaces for headlines, and serif typefaces for body text. As with e-mail, avoid using “artsy” typefaces that are difficult to read. Make sure the lettering contrasts properly with the background. White lettering on a dark background slows down reading time.

Use exclamation points and uppercase sparingly. As mentioned earlier in the book, upper case represents shouting. Exclamation points also express strong emotion. Prefer to let the visitors to your site decide how excited they are rather than telling them how excited they should be.

Words on your website must both communicate your message and trigger emotion or action in your reader. Information can sprawl for pages and pages for only pennies; space is cheap. Time is not. Make each word count.

ARTICLE TAGLINE FOR DIANNA BOOHER

1154 words
Author of 42 books (Simon & Schuster/Pocket, Warner, and McGraw-Hill), Dianna Booher, CSP, CPAE, delivers keynotes, breakout sessions, and training on communication and life-balance issues. Her latest books: Speak with Confidence®, Your Signature Life®, Your Signature Work®, E-Writing, and Communicate with Confidence®. For more information on Dianna and her programs, visit www.diannabooher.com or contact her firm, Booher Consultants, Inc., at 800-342-6621.