Click here!

How many websites have you visited that instruct you to ‘click here’?  There are plenty of people who use this phrase in the hope that your curiosity will get the better of you.  However, my response to an instruction to ‘click here’ is ‘why should I?’

OK so I can be difficult, but I used to be a communications skills trainer and was taught to ask difficult questions!  I won’t blindly click anywhere – I want to know what I’ll get if I do.  Maybe a shipment of champagne is expecting a bit much for following a simple website instruction, but at the very least I want to know where I’m going; better still if you tell me what I get in the way of benefits.

This is not rocket science – it’s pretty straight forward.  Let’s do some examples.

You want me to look at the services you have to offer in more depth – Discover more about our services now.

You want me to find out what your magic product will do for me – Explore what one courrse will do for your business.

You want me to find out what a super person I am and how excited I am about what I do – Check out our passion and progress

Are you getting the idea?  Use live hyperlinks – don’t expect people to scroll anywhere, make it easy and tell them where they’re going if they follow the link.

Every picture tells a story

… or does it?  I keep seeing websites that feature pretty pictures right across the page, in prime real estate that really don’t help to make their point – and especially not to people who have only just ‘landed’.

Then there are those appalling stock photos of attractive people in blue suits that abound.  I haven’t been in any office where everyone looks so beautiful – or wears such naff clothes!  They look exactly what they are – posed photos and say almost nothing about the organisation they are supposedly promoting – except perhaps that they are unwilling to spend money on getting decent visuals for the website.

Then there’s the other end of the scale – the websites full of charts, diagrams and flow process visuals.  Most of these tell me very little of use or interest – I want to know what’s in it for me.  A bar chart showing how other organisations have gone from X to Y as a direct result of using the produce or service might be interesting – but not lots of confusing stuff that just blows my mind.  A before and after comparison works well, but not lots of examples of outcomes without any consistency or explanation.

Simple, clear and concise is what I want – I’ll ask if I want more.

So – before you start adding pictures to your website (or letting your designer loose in the photolibrary), make sure that every one works in helping your web visitor to understand what you can do for them.

Crafting your message

I’ve got on my soapbox about focus in previous blogs, but the whole page needs to have a purpose AND to be written in a clean and concise style.

Let’s look at structure for a page.

• Start by deciding your purpose for the page – what do you want people to do when they’ve read (or scanned it)?  There’s lots about this in earlier blogs.
• Decide what are the key pieces of information you want the reader to get
• Take each item of information and work out what the advantages (nice to have) and benefits (emotional triggers – the answers to ‘what’s in it for me?’)
• Think about the problems that your potential customer faces – that your product or service solves and list the problems.

With all this information you’ve got what you need to write the page – whether it’s your home page, your services page or your products page.  About us pages are slightly different – and there’s more about these in other blog entries.

The headline uses either a problem or a big benefit as the trigger to get people reading – ‘Are you struggling to … ?’ or ‘You can have … ?

The first paragraph builds on the headline – developing either more pain or describing life as it could be with the benefit in place.

The second paragraph develops more benefits and could be followed with a bullet list of things that people get (or problems they are currently experiencing).

The final paragraph will reassure them that solving their problem is possible, easy, cost effective … and deliver a call to action.

Of course, this is not the only way to write a web page – but it’s a good place to start if you are not experienced and want to get a good result!

Writing webcopy in black and white

It’s not that I’m old fashioned, but there’s nothing like good old black and white – as long as the writing is black and the background is white.  However, reverse that combination and you have a problem.

When the background is darker than the text, the reader has to work much harder to read.  Whilst a sexy black page may be visually appealing, the eye/brain connection is bedazzled!  Lots of little thin white lines criss-crossing a dark background create a dazzle effect, making your subconscious work really hard to actually see what the words are.

If the information is not ‘received’ by your brain, there is an instinctive (and also subconscious) assumption that the information is ‘difficult’ and many people simply won’t make the effort to continue reading.

It’s not just black and white either – yellow writing on dark blue, forest green or burgundy backgrounds all do pretty much the same thing (all of which I have seen on web pages).  A good rule of thumb is to simply ensure that the background is lighter than the text and that the differential in tone between the two makes it easy for the eye to see the words.

When it comes to headlines in nice big bold text you can get away with reversed out writing, because the lines that make up the letters are not lines, but shapes.

Backgrounds don’t have to be white (although it does create a nice crisp look) – pastel shades such as very pale blue, cream or yellow all work well (and often aid reading for people with dyslexia).  Neither does the writing have to be black, but it does have to be dark enough to to stand out against the background – so dark blue on cream or pale yellow will work; so will very dark green.

Remember – the fewer obstacles you put in front of your reader getting the message, the better!