Five ways your web writing is annoying your readers

Author : Jacob Funnell

Posted : 29 / 04 / 14

Having a website is a wonderful thing: it allows you to confuse and frustrate people thousands of miles away without ever having to hear their complaints.

This makes it very hard to see what the problems are – and very tempting to pretend that they don’t exist.

Your web pages don’t have to be like that. It all comes down to avoiding the five most common web-writing traps. Here’s how.

Skip the happy talk

Imagine stepping into a lift or elevator and hearing this announcement: ‘Thank you for entering this building’s lift. We’re pleased you’ve chosen the number one lift provider in this building. To select your desired floor, please use the illuminated buttons.’

Clearly ridiculous – yet a similar thing happens on many web pages: ‘Thank you for browsing our widgets. We are the market leaders in widgets and are dedicated to producing the best widgets for you. We’ve been making widgets since 1990. To browse our widgets, click on the links below.’

Web usability expert Steve Krug calls this kind of space-filling, meaningless text ‘happy talk’, and recommends a simple test to root it out: read it out loud. If you hear a quiet voice saying in your head ‘blah blah blah’, then it’s happy talk.

In this example, the only potentially useful information is ‘To browse our widgets, click on the links below’. But if simple tasks such as browsing your site require instructions, there’s a very good chance that it’s not better phrasing you need, but more intuitive web design.

Don’t be afraid of keeping text content to a minimum, if it makes things clearer. An excellent example of this is the Gov.uk site, which won the Design of the Year award in 2013. See the section for drivers as an example. There’s no happy talk or clutter, and all the links are self-explanatory.

Answer the golden question

Everyone visiting your web pages will have a need.

This can range from the highly specific, such as a need to buy a particular product, to a vague need for distraction. You need to work out which of these needs also benefits your organisation, then tailor your website to meet them.

This is hard because people can arrive in a bewildering variety of ways. Imagine a large shopping centre with an underground car park, an internal metro station, a bus-stop, a helipad, several pedestrian entrances – and, just for added complication, a few ladders leaning up against windows. Where do you greet the visitors, and how do you establish what they need?

Website visitors can come from search engines, social media, reference by a friend, a link from a site, by directly typing the address into their browser after seeing an advert, or just from memory. You have no way of telling where the next one will come from, and no control over which page they see first.

This means each page, by itself, needs to answer the golden question of web writing: ‘Am I in the right place?’

Within about five seconds.

This is a hard test to pass. Try it for yourself:

Get someone who isn’t familiar with your website to look at an important page. Ask them what they think that page is about after a few seconds. There’s a good chance you’ll be surprised by their answer.
Go to FiveSecondTest.com (the free version is fine for this) and ask some anonymous people from the internet to do the same thing.

If this all sounds too painful, try it on the sites of your competitors or similar organisations. You’ll be surprised at how many of them fail. This can be quite satisfying, but bear in mind that your site probably suffers from some of the same problems.

People will tend to stay on your site if they think they’re in the right place – just as you’ll keep searching for what you need in a department store if you think you’re likely to find it. However, you’ll need to make sure they can find it reasonably swiftly, as anyone who’s ever stormed off in an empty-handed huff will attest.

Be credible

If Google is to be believed, the world is crammed full of ‘world leaders’, hundreds of thousands of them, all leading the world in … something or other. A Google search for ‘world leader in the field of’ returns more than five million results.

Phrases like this give no information and are not by themselves credible. They only take a few key strokes to type and anyone can claim them – and your readers know it. They will filter it out.

This applies most obviously to marketing copy, where a handful of testimonials from satisfied people are worth more than anything, however wondrous, the company claims about itself.

But it also applies in a more subtle way to non-marketing claims. For example, if you claim you are ‘always there to help’, then back it up by making your contact details easy to find.

Make your headlines work

The pressure on headlines is staggering, which makes writing them hard. But it doesn’t have to be, if you follow three rules:

They must be informative. They’re the first thing the reader scans, and often the only thing they’ll bother to read, so they need to communicate essentially what the page is about.
They need to be concise, to the point and short.
And they have to be easy to understand for everyone in your target audience. So think twice before using industry-insider terms that a new customer may not understand.

When writing a headline, keep in mind the golden question: ‘Am I in the right place?’ Your headline needs to answer that in as plain a way as possible.

Gov.uk does well again here – its section covering areas as diverse as apprenticeships, school applications and university loans is summarised as ‘Education and learning’. It’s short, informative and easy to understand. The body copy (also very short) lets people know the detail.

KISS with confidence

Keeping it Short and Simple is a fundamental part of all professional writing, and it’s particularly important when you’re writing for the web.

On the web, you’re always fighting to hold your audience’s attention (and to keep them away from the back button), so the shorter the sweeter. Also, your visitors will have different levels of English comprehension – some may have lower levels of literacy, including those for whom English is not a first language.

Keeping it short and simple will help all the visitors to your site by making it easier to use and understand. This in turn increases trust, and helps your visitors achieve their goals quickly and simply.

Bob’s your uncle

Apply these five rules to your website, and you’ll soon see your communications becoming leaner, cleaner and more efficient. And while you may not be able to see your website visitors’ blood pressure lowering, you’ll soon start to witness the effects. When they realise they’re able to find what they’re looking for on your website quickly and easily, they’ll trust your organisation to be able to meet their needs with the same efficiency.

To find out how to optimise your web writing for search engines, see A beginner’s guide to keyword research. For tips on how to keep it short and simple, see Three ways to tame your sentences and the Power up with the active voice video.