I had the privilege of attending a workshop by Techved Design on writing content for the web. I wasn’t planning to leave the house in the killing humidity and heat but changed my mind thanks to my dearest friend Neha Modgil.
Writing immersible content for the web is always challenging. It’s a medium not known to sustain readership beyond a few seconds. Imagine having to sell a product in a limited amount of time and sustaining the attention span of an online user. This is what the workshop intended to address. Content speaks to a specific audience and good content only makes the actions on the website more compelling.
A few scientific facts that relate to web content – people don’t read web pages, they scan. Reading is usually 25% slower on the web than print. Also, since readers don’t read what has been written on the web page, therefore the first few paragraphs of your article must state the important things first to sustain interest. Another surprising aspect about online behavior is that users tend to focus on images first, particularly if the image is that of a lady.
The anatomy of a web page content is divided into three parts – Page Title, Heading and Paragraph. Therefore for better comprehension of the content, a page title must be clear, short and simple, the heading must be used to make the major points and the first paragraph should describe the major points in detail. The inverted pyramid style of writing web content is a good example of presenting the conclusions at the beginning while providing the details at the end. This helps the user to grasp the gist of the article immediately.
Amidst some live examples in slides the discussion then pointed towards best practices of web content writing. Such as using highlighted points, having lists, using bulleted points to aid in scanning the details, avoid writing numbers (1 rather than ‘one’) and not using underlined text that gives the impression of a link to the user. Most importantly avoid using jargon in your content writing.
Amongst other things the workshop focussed on case studies and research papers too. One research suggested that if the length of the line is too long it slows the reading speed considerably. Another research provided conclusive evidence about the preference of users for left aligned text because the focus point of reading is fixed and always constant. Also the workshop discussed making software error messages concise and simple to understand. In a nutshell an ideal error message should tell the user what the error is, where the error is and how the error can be rectified.
Sadly a very interesting and insightful workshop had to be concluded but not before it left an indelible mark on our minds.
