Strategy
Ten Tips for
Better Web Site Content Design
- Be succinct. Write your page copy then reduce the number of words
by 50%. Focus on what's really important to your visitors. People read via
computer monitors at least 25% more slowly than paper.
- Create visual clarity. Use headlines, bolded words (but not underlined),
bulleted lists, tables, and other visual structures to make it easy for
the visitor to quickly understand the key points of a page.
- Expose agency personality. You don't need to write in a dry, academic,
or gray business-speak manner. On the other hand, don't be too cute.
- Edit your copy. Spell check. Grammar check. Fact check. Have multiple
people proof your copy before posting it. Have a professional writer clean
and tighten your copy. Errors on your site reduce credibility.
- Use plain language your audience can understand. Your Web site
visitors are not insurance experts. They may not understand technical insurance
language. Use metaphors sparingly. People may misinterpret them.
- Make it easy for your visitors to get to what they care about.
Avoid trying to include too many subjects on one page. Provide a conceptual
and linking structure so that visitors can get to the content they're seeking
without wading through volumes of what is to them irrelevant text.
- Write meaningful page titles. Remember that visitors may enter
your site other than through your home page. Search engines may list a page
from your site only by its title. Page titles are used in browser history
lists, so make them meaningful and unique page to page.
- Foster legibility. Use san serif fonts (like Arial) for body text.
They're easier to read than serif fonts (like Times Roman) on computer monitors.
Avoid font and background colors with inadequate contrast (white and black
provide the highest contrast).
- Focus on scanability. Remember that a substantial part of the
population is red-green colorblind. Visitors scan sites more than they read
them. Scan each of your pages. Is it quickly obvious what they cover?
- Use multi-media sparingly. If it isn't critical to getting your
point across, skip it. Most of the population is connected to the Internet
via dial-up modems, not broadband.
Digested from Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Site Usability
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