Web Design, SEO and Business Articles

Why it is important to write good web copy?

Your web copy makes a massive impact on the success of your website. It’s how you communicate with customers online. Without interesting and well structured content your website is likely to under achieve. It’s the text on your site that helps to sell your products or service, and the quality and accessibly of the information on your site that gives visitors a reason to come back. This article provides some tips that you can use to help improve the web copy that you write.

Tip 1 – Find out about your audience

Build a picture of your target audience. Find out how old they are, what their interests are, what other websites they like to visit and anything else that helps build up a profile of your audience.

You can find a wealth of information by reading magazines that target a similar audience to your website. They are likely to have researched this audience and tailored their content based on this research. If your site is selling a product or service, you should pay particular attention to adverts in the magazines as they will show how other companies are targeting this group. This information will be valuable both when writing content and when deciding on what content to have on your site.

Tip 2 – Give them relevant information

This stems from tip 1. Through knowing your target audience you can decide what information is relevant to them. You can use the information that you gathered about your target audience to help generate a list of content and features to have on your website. At the end of the day, you want your website’s content to appeal to your target audience because they are the people you want to visit the site.

Tip 3 – Write for your audience.

When it comes to writing style it is important to pitch it just right. This is not as easy as it sounds and if you get it wrong you can end up either confusing or patronising your audience. Keeping your writing style friendly and not overly formal is a good approach for most websites. In your writing, give users all the facts and avoid marketing jargon this approach is good for building users trust in your site and your organisation. This in turn will mean they are more likely to purchase from you or return to your site for more information.

Tip 4 – Get feedback from your audience

Wherever possible speak to your audience and use feedback to improve the content currently on your site. You can also gather information on what content the audience would like to see on your site. By doing this you can improve the content already on your site and get good ideas for new content that will encourage new visitors.

Tip 5 – Make your text scanable

You should consider the text on your web site as part of the interface. People use the text in headings subheadings and the navigation to decide if your site contains the information they need, and how to find it. This is important when writing for the web because people tend to read online content differently from offline content. They are less likely to read the entire contents of your site, but instead skip to sections they find particularly relevant. It is therefore important to make your content easy to scan. You can do this by:

• Putting a summary at the top of the page
• Using meaningful heading and subheadings
• Using bold, italics and colour to highlight important information
• Using bulleted lists when introducing a series of related items
• Using numbered lists for instructions or where the order of things is important

If you are still in the dark about what you want your website to look like and what features you want it to have, then next time you surf the internet bookmark sites that you like and sites you don’t like. To do this, create two new folders in your bookmarks and name them like and hate. Alternatively you could open an account with del.icio.us (http://delicious.com), this account allows you to keep all your bookmarks in one, online account. Using del.icio.us you can access your bookmarks from anywhere.

If you do this, then by the time you are ready to talk to a developer about designing a new site, you will have built up a list of sites that you like and don’t like and this will provide a great starting point for discussing what you want your own site to look like and features that you would like to see, illustrated by a list of examples.

When a visitor arrives at your website they are generally looking for information. Different visitors may be looking for different types of information, but they will all be looking for information. The visitor will generally have a quick glance at your home page and decide whether the site has the information they require. If it is not easy to find the information that they need then they will return to the search engine or directory where they found your site and try the next site.

Given that this is how most people use the Internet what implications does it have for web design? There are two main implications here that must be considered, the structure of the information on the page and the look of the page.

The first factor to consider when designing a home page is how you structure the information. Since most visitors arrive at the homepage prepared to spend a few seconds searching for the information they want, your home page has to provide a guide to the information that is contained in the rest of your site. This guide has to be structured in such a way that a user can find, at a glance the section of your site that contains the relevant information.

The second implication is the look of your site. Although the structure of the information is of primary importance this does not mean that you can ignore the look of your site, especially if it is a business site. The visitor will make a judgement on the credibility and professionalism of your company based on the quality of your website. There for it is important that the design of the page promotes a professional image.

So when designing the home page you want to consider all the information that your site will contain and design your home page so that it provides a brief overview of the information in each section of your site. When deciding on a look for your site it is important that it looks good, without being over cluttered with bells and whistles. It is generally better to use a conventional approach to the navigation. For example you can use Flash to create navigation with different animation affects, but you need to ask yourself will a visitor wait several minutes for the Flash plugin to download before they can use the navigation. Another drawback with Flash is a search engines may not be able to follow the links created in Flash.