As a follow up to my earlier post on free writing, I said I would talk about the next step: editing your results. My inspiration for this piece is an observation by Jakob Nielsen:
Nearly 80% of Your Visitors Won’t Read Your Page
In 1997, Jakob Nielsen observed in his seminal post: How Users Read the Web , that 79% of people don’t read a webpage, they scan it. That is, they glance through a page rather than read it word for word. Eleven years later (How Little Do Users Read?) Nielsen reported on another study which suggested that readers read about 20% of the content on the page.
People don’t read webpages, they scan them.
Here are five easy things you can do to make your page scan friendly so that 79% of your visitors get your message.
How to Keep Readers Happy: Five Tips to Get Your Message to Visitors
What can be done? Well, Nielsen recommends the following:
- one idea per paragraph
- highlight the keywords – using bold, italics for example
- sub-headings
- bullet points
- half the word count (of conventional writing)
I’ll elaborate on a couple of the key points below.
Use Headings as Teasers
You don’t need to give away everything with your headings – use them as teasers rather than spoilers.
Give it a little thought and try and come up with something eye-catching – a teaser if you will that will pique the readers interest.
Make sure it is related to the content below (so just putting SEX as an H1 tag is not the answer. Yes, it gets attention but unless your content is about Sex there will be disappointment – and nothing hurts like disappointment about sex.)
Use Headings as Signposts to Your Content
Use headings like signposts in your content – pointing of to the reader the keypoints of your article and giving them an overview of what they will find when they read it.
My personal test is: Can I get the point of the article from the headings alone? That is, without having to read the text.
Give your blog the bullet (point)
Use bullet points to summarize key points that you will cover in more detail in the text that follows.
This is particularly important if you are going to describe a process or present a detail argument. Summarize it in bullet points first so you reader knows what they’re getting or what they’re are missing out on!
How Long Should My Bullet Be?
I recommend bullet points be no longer than one line.
If you need to write more, than put it in a paragraph below – indent it if you need to, to show it is related to the bullet point. But even then the clarification should be brief and not push the other bullet points down the page.
If you find that you need to write more than say three lines, then you may as well convert the bullet point to a heading or a sub-heading.
Sometimes Less is More – the Ghastly Blank Isn’t Always
Was it school or college that got us to focus on word-count and the belief that the more text the better?
Well, in the web world white space and less words on the page is often a good thing because it makes the page easier on the eye and the key points (assuming you have used bold, headings and bullets) easier to spot and pick up.
It’s easier to spot a cow on an empty field than in a forest.
Use more white space or break up the text with images.
Visitors Are Guests Not Prisoners
Visitors can don’t need to read your webpage, they are not obligated to read your content. They don’t owe you a thing.
As a blog writer you owe them the courtesy of providing good, interesting content in a format that respects their intelligence as much as their time.
Respect your visitors and your story (you do want someone to read it, right?) and think about more white space, headings and bullets points.
Give them a road map and a highway taking them through the picturesque landscape of your content rather than a (metaphorical) wooden sign that promises a glimpse of sunlight before plunging them into a verbal quagmire.
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