What results you say?  Well, good web copy can effectively raise your website’s conversion rate as much as 100%.  In non-jargon, that means double your online sales or leads without increasing your traffic at all.

A picture may tell a thousand words, but I don’t know anyone who buys something without actual words to explain what it is (features), why it is relevant to you (benefits), and why you should feel comfortable taking action (guarantees).

Four key principles we have discovered that lead to effective writing for the web:

1. Relevant headlines
2. Short, scannable text with good in-text linking (information scent)
3. Simple, jargon-free writing
4. Customer-focused copy

Relevant Headlines

Visitors don’t read online, they scan.  Or, my favorite term, they “pogo stick” around your website until they find something interesting and relevant.  Use headers that are short, focused, and begin with relevant key words that your visitors are scanning for.  If you are trying to drive action, begin your headers with an action verb.

A good resource on the topic is this article Jakob Nielsen wrote about the BBC’s guidelines for creating headlines that persuade visitors to click through to a story.

Short, Scannable Text with Good In-text Linking (Information Scent)

Your visitors are looking for specific information.  You do not have them hostage in the way that TV, radio and other traditional “push” media once did.  Your visitors are self-directed and they know what they want.  Work with your visitors to help them find what they are looking for, and you will benefit.

Key principles include writing in short chunks, emphasizing key points through the usage of:

• bold and italics
• bulleting lists
• short paragraphs for easy scanning
• good in-text linking of relevant phrases your visitors are searching for
  

One of the most useful studies of the web found that online we act as foragers, looking for the “scent” of specific information that is relevant to us.  Giving our visitors as many opportunities as possible to find the information scent they are looking for through these principles will result in happier visitors who engage more deeply with your organization.

Read Jakob Nielsen’s classic article on writing for the web.

Simple, Jargon-free Writing

You find it hard to write about your organization without throwing in lots of nonsensical words that mean nothing to your visitors.  Why?  We all do.  It’s the nature of spending 99% of our time with our organization and working each and every day to make it better, and spending 1% of our time with potential clients of our organization.  As one of the top experts in the field of web persuasion likes to say, you can’t read the label on a bottle from the inside.

One of the easiest ways to combat this is to measure the reading level of the content on your website.  We have built a helpful tool on our website that lets you measure the reading level of your copy here: website writing readability level.

General guidelines:

• For a website aimed at professional buyers (businesses), aim for an 8th grade reading level or below.
• For a website aimed at consumers, aim for a 5th grade reading level or below

Customer-focused Copy

One of the best tools to improve the quality of your web copy and generate more results from your existing visitors is to rewrite your copy in terms relevant to them.

Why does this matter?  It’s the age-old marketing concept of features versus benefits.  Features are things that your product or service can do.  Benefits are things that it does for me.  Until you make it relevant to me, I don’t care.

The simplest way to accomplish that we have ever seen comes from the good folks behind the book Reality Marketing Revolution, Mike Lieberman and Eric Keiles.  We have adopted one of their techniques into what we call the Red/Green Score.  To run this test, simply do the following:

1. Print out a page from your website.
2. Circle every instance of I, We, Us, Our, or your company name with a red circle.
3. Circle every instance of You and Your with a green triangle.  This is “me-focused copy,” or features.
4. Total up each, and subtract the triangles from the circles.  This is “customer-focused” copy, or benefits.

If your Red/Green Score is zero or negative, rewrite your copy until it is not.  The most effective copy is typically at least 60-70% customer-focused.

Good luck writing, and let me know what you think!

One of the interesting parts of working in custom web design is creating specific calls to action that actually produce the desired results. We definitely haven’t nailed down the process yet, but we believe it is our obligation as a professional web design firm to give our clients the best possible return on their investment. We identify key site goals with our clients through our Discover and Define process, create unique calls to action to funnel visitors, while maintaining usability and putting the visitor experience first.

A recent example is our redesign of the Julie Lawrence Yoga Center site. By pairing images of the yoga classes to develop visitor interest, with large orange buttons that guide them through the site, we hope to maintain the design aesthetic our clients are looking for, provide the portals that the site visitors are looking for and turning that visitor desire into action.

There are several different methodologies that are used in usability testing. The one that we prefer is a hybrid of techniques recommended by Jakob Nielsen (www.useit.com), the self-appointed guardian of usability on the web, and Mark Hurst, the head of the influential usability company Creative Good (www.creativegood.com). The idea is to get unbiased users who match the different audience segments on your website and observe them while they “think” outloud. Both the user’s face and their mouse movements are recorded on a single video feed, giving us a powerful bit of evidence about how well the website we are testing works.

Usability testing can be useful in several different ways. First, it can uncover obvious problems with your website that can greatly improve its usability and therefore its overall conversion rate (making or saving you more money!). Usually these problems can be fixed for a nominal cost, but they were “hidden” from both your website design company and yourself because you are too close to the product to see it as a new user will. Second, usability testing can help you to find large, strategic issues with your website. Often these take the form of, “oh, users don’t understand that our company does X.” Or, “our users don’t understand that the point of page A is for them to contact us for a quote.” As we repeatedly emphasize, you can never make something too easy on the web. Lastly, usability testing can help to depersonalize the design, copy-writing and development components of your website. While most people are rarely short on opinions about how something should be done, there is nothing quite as useful as real user feedback to get everyone thinking again about what the customer wants.

I’ll leave you with some sample quotes from some of our usability tests. These are often the most effective way to summarize the findings of a series of usability tests:

“I don’t know my flight number, I’m filling this out because I need help finding [a flight]. I’m confused!â€??

“At times I thought it was too messy. I couldn’t find things on the homepage. I like sites that are simple and clear. Everything was so flashy that nothing grabbed my attention. I clicked on a tab to get away from the homepage.”

“Text is very small – with a lot of text to sift through, it may be challenging for older eyes. I know I struggled. Link colors are also a little light.”

“Website is messy at times…too many things happening at one time. Homepage had many things happening. I looked for something to grab my attention, and nothing really did on the homepage.”

1. There is no such thing as information overload, just bad design. Manage clutter by fixing the design. To clarify, ADD detail.
2. 90% of every screen should be content, NOT marketing, not including navigation. People generally don’t do a Google search for ‘pretty design’ or ‘marketing fluff.’
3. Get out of the dominance relationship with your audience�??let them use their own cognitive styles. The way you gain credibility with your audience is your demonstrated mastery of detail. Make the design about the content, not the design.
4. The lower the resolution, the longer the meeting: clarity is key!
5. Show your information at once, adjacent in space, rather than stacked in time. Known in powerpoint as ‘one damn thing after another!’
6. Start with the interface design and at as high a resolution as possible and let that drive the process.
7. Reduce design variation to allow the viewer to concentrate on evidence variation.
8. Be aware that your presentation will stand or fall on the quality, credibility, and relevance of its content.
9. A good test for a design is whether or not it evokes responses tothe content.
10. Grand principles of design:

* Show comparisons
* Show causality
* Show more than 1 or 2 variables-serious problems are multivariate, show multivariate evidence
* Integrate word knowledge and image: use annotations to pieces of content to help interpretation
* Document everything and tell people about it: documentation is a quality control mechanism and determines credibility
* Be aware that a presentation stands or falls on the quality, integrity, and relevance of the content. Good design cannot salvage failed content. Science is a content-driven enterprise.
* Use small multiples
* Don’t Dequantify: Thinking and designing are as one.

I love this observation found in Chip and Dan Heath’s Made to Stick. When I first read this, it immediately made me think about usability testing – the process of observing users unfamiliar with a site as they try to complete specific tasks on that site.

New observers are almost universally struck by the divergence between expected and actual behavior. For me, it is a humbling experience to watch users ignore seemingly “can’t miss” parts of the page, to fail to complete the easiest tasks given to them, and become irritated with the features that were supposed to impress or help them. Running counter to the tendency and desire of most of us (designers, developers, clients) to add whizzy new features or innovative design elements, the results of usability testing constantly reinforce the importance of simplifying, clarifying, and focusing every page on a site for a specific purpose. Usability testing reminds us that design elegance is achieved by removing as much as possible, and that simple, focused sites are preferred by the only people who really matter: our customers.