Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Some copy writing skills

This is important when building a good web page that people will pay attention to

* Bullets- Listing out items in bulleted lists makes it much easier for a visitor to get useful information. Bulleted lists work great for emphasizing multiple benefits, as each benefit gets sufficient space to stand out and all of the benefits can be quickly scanned by visitors wondering if a given product or service will satisfy their needs.

* Bolding- Within paragraphs of copy, it’s a good idea to bold the more critical text. Visitors’ eyes will be able to quickly latch onto those important, bolded points amidst the rest of the text. That said, use bolding sparingly as too much will simply overwhelm visitors and actually hurt your visitors’ ability to skim and scan your text.

* Hyperlinks- Hyperlinks’ contrasting blue color and underlining also grab the eye and cause hyperlinked words to pop out at visitors. But since links are clickable, those hyperlinked words and phrases can also be used to qualify visitors and move them to pages and messaging crafted to speak to and answer more specific needs and questions - stuff that may not interest everyone but that will be important to specific segments of your audience.

* Sub-headlines- Break your content up into sections and label those sections with Sub-headlines (also called subheads). Once you’ve done that, try reading just the subheads and see if you come away with the gist of page’s content. Not only will this help visitors quickly scan the page for content, but it will also allow them to skip down to the section that’s most important to them. And as an added bonus, Sub-headlines help create needed whitespace for your page layout.

* White Space- White space makes it easier for visitors to find information and focus on what they are really looking for. Ensure you leave white space by breaking up long paragraphs (consider more than 5 stacked lines to be too long), using sub-headlines and bullets, and by maintaining decent margins and line spacing. Web copy should never look intimidating or too densely packed.

* Jargon- Using highly technical words or industry jargon inhibits skimming and scanning for anyone who isn’t 100% familiar with the terminology. As a general rule, copy on a broad-audience website should be at or below a fifth grade reading level. If specific technical terms are necessary, say if they are a key search term, link them to a glossary or FAQ, or explain the terms within the text itself.

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