Your website's success, as in every other business endeavor, reflects the effort you put into serving your visitor's needs.
Every page of your website has the chance to be an effective sales and marketing tool for your business or organization. It can also show your ignorance, your carelessness or your sloppy inattention to detail.
Like any written document, you should start by understanding what your web page is going to be about. Write your page description before committing another word to your page. Good web page descriptions are a simple summary of the content. Once you can summarize your page to a single sentence, you are ready to write.
Internet users expect web page content to be concise. Get to the point and mention your core ideas, then fill in the details in later paragraphs. The first and second sentence should allow people to decide if they want to continue reading.
The ideal page length is 250 to 500 words. Exceptions may include article reprints, biographies and technical information. If your website wants to promotes products or services, you should be careful to keep the main body of your text above the scroll on a full-sized monitor set at 1024 x 768.
Some specific tips for successful web writing:
- Avoid flowery phrases. Your visitor is more likely to scan than to read your text. Let their brains have easy access to the phrases and ideas that brought them to your page.
- Use bulleted text in short bursts. A list should be easy to scan and make your point. More than 5 bullet points are usually too many.
- Be selective of text links. Use them when necessary, but make sure that it doesn't interrupt the flow of your material.
- Your promotional text should lead clearly to an action by the visitor. Make it easy for them to "contact you" or "buy now". Subtlety is for poetry.
- Spell check, spell check, spell check!
Your website's success, as in every other business endeavor, reflects the effort you put into serving your visitor's needs. A well-written web page reflects on the quality of your professionalism and can help turn that visitor into a customer.