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Writing for the Web
- 1. Writing for the Web
- 10. What did you remember?
- 17. These two sets of jars both have labels. Why is one preferable to the other?
- 19. The Beauty of Bullets
- 28. Another Example
- 34. Exercise
Hinweis der Redaktion
- Welcome Who reads books? Why do you read a book? How do you read it? What makes a book good – keeps you from tossing it aside? Why do you use the web? How do you use it? (Does anyone read a book online?) With the shift in medium – shift in tasks - = shift in the way the content is presented – Everyone sign on to the PC Self-introductions Steve: what are you hoping to get out of this? Kris: slow down Before we get started, does anyone have any burning questions that I can make sure I address as we go through this?
- So what are some things we know about prospective undergraduates?
- Prospective undergrads are: busy multitasking not going to stay long scanning through hundreds of sites to come up with a short list finding us on other sites Not: don’t know, don’t care how the college is internally organized don’t know our jargon, don’t want to (we’ll look at that more later) So those are some characteristics of the people we are writing for
- Gerry McGovern is the author of Killer Web Content, also writes a very good blog With a college web site, what does “tasks” mean? What do they want to do when they come here? There’s no need to guess about this, or make assumptions.
- Give them 30 seconds or so to write down what they remembered think about if someone comes up to you and asks you in person "tell me about this program" - what do you tell them? not "the department prepares educators who respect diversity" Cut the welcome and marketese. They know they're on your web page. you can put lipstick on a pig and it's still a pig but you can change the content to make the information easier to find even if you don't have the budget for redesign you can redesign your content
- This might be what a site visitor would want to know when they visit this site. Next slide is a screenshot; I’ll leave it up for 10-15 seconds and then remove it. Users will spend approximately 10-15 seconds scanning a page before moving on And will only “read” 20% of the text
- What do they need to know? There’s no need to guess at this Existing research or just ASK THEM
- F pattern. Placement. Location. most important stuff (FOR THEM) go top left then line down Implications: – Most users don’t read text thoroughly – First two paragraphs = most important info – Subheads, paragraphs & bullets should start with information-carrying words
- Bullets example: next two slides We’ll talk about care words in just a minute.
- Answer: you’d have to open up each jar – same as a large body of text -
- This is the same thing as a bunch of jars without labels…
- Both use labeling systems, but one is an internal labeling system, that only the owner of that kitchen knows and can therefore use, while the other uses language that anyone walking into the kitchen could understand. So we need to use headings and language on the website that anyone can walk into and use, find what they’re looking for without having to dig into each container, right away, quickly and easily. Can anyone think of internal jargon that we use within the college but people outside these walls wouldn’t know? (New Horizons, Institutional Effectiveness, Experiential Learning)
- When Penn State went from links in paragraph form , like this…
- … to links in bulleted form, clicks on just that area doubled or tripled.
- Care words: anyone know what I mean by this term? Gerry McGovern introduced this Key words… Words that make your customers act. Ex: search dorm life on our site If you don’t know whether the words they use are the ones we use: what do you do about that? How can you find out what they call it?
- Fictional student development page. What do we want them to do? (What’s the important information here) (first let them know date/time/place)
- Now can see quickly when and where, also deadline. What’s the careword/keyword in 3 rd para (criteria)
- Hyperlink now doing double duty : color and underline of the link calls attention to the word while scanning Let’s take this a little further the program isn’t just for this year- the awards ceremony is, though there should be a link to nomination form here, right now there’s no way to nominate also the catalog reference needs to be linked We rearrange:
- Is this not clearer We have an intro statement Clear info about where and when Forms linked right next to deadline infe Criteria linked, you also have to know something from the catalog, and that’s linked also. Links draw attention to the important bits – Now: Can we use bullets, cutting, headers to help even more? (this doesn’t need to be bulleted, just needed pruning and judicious highlighting and linking) This making sense? Any questions?
- Added catchy, scannable headings; put key information into bullets; cut the content to the most important key words.
- This is an example from Jakob Nielsen’s site; he took a paragraph from a tourism site and rewrote it. He measured the time it took for people to read it, how much they remembered, and how many errors they made in memory. So we’ll show you this first slide for a few seconds and see how much you can get out of it…
- What’s different about this? (invite response) Concise text – half the word count Scannable layout Objective language (marketese increases cognitive load)
- Task focus: always focus on what they need to know, give it to them as quickly and clearly as possible Concise: prune away everything that could possibly obscure the core Scannable: quick glance should show what it’s about and where to go Care words: What is your audience looking for? Objective: Just the facts
- Could I have a volunteer – we will take a look at your page and rewrite it! (mathematics? MBA? Grad studies?)