A common problem we encounter when developing a website is the difficulty some of our clients have in creating the necessary text for its publication. We not only need to inform users about the company's services, products, and values, but also inform Google what the page is about so it can index and display it in relevant searches. Therefore, we provide some guidelines to facilitate this task, which we understand is difficult, but absolutely necessary.
Style and tone
It's very important that our style be consistent and in line with our target audience. The first commandment of web design is to put ourselves in our user's shoes and see our website from their perspective. This way, we can better understand them, find our voice for the text, and begin a mutually beneficial dialogue. Writing for someone seeking financial advice isn't the same as writing for someone looking for cool skate shoes.
By doing this exercise, we'll find it easier to answer questions like, "Sir" or "Sir?", "Can I use technical jargon?", "Simply" or "Go into more detail?" And we'll see that emojis should never be used in professional text if our target audience is over 12 years old.
Writing about yourself
The text for the "About" or "About Us" section is often the most difficult, as we struggle to talk about ourselves objectively. We struggle to separate our "voice" for the text from our own "I." A good technique is to leave the first person and write in the third person as if we were a narrator. Once the text is finished, we can revert it to the first person, or not, depending on how it turns out. Another idea is to let someone else write it, and then revise it to our liking.
Structure
Writing for the web is different than for other, more traditional media. When we write a document, whether printed or in PDF, we can, to a certain extent, assume that the reader will read it from beginning to end. We have the luxury of including a preamble, arguments, and a conclusion.
On the web, we don't have that luxury because web users don't "read" in the strictest sense of the word. When we're browsing, we tend to scan content, "hunting" for bits of information, which will lead us to other bits of information, until we find what we're looking for. When we scan, we only read the first few lines of each paragraph, to see if it's worth continuing or skipping to the next paragraph.
If we put the most important information at the end of the text, we have little chance of the user reaching it. Furthermore, we have a hard time reading long paragraphs, or "walls of text" without spaces or headings when we're scanning, since there are no natural points to focus our eyes on. And if we put important information in the middle of a long paragraph, the user is very likely to skip over it.
Therefore, if we structure our text into short paragraphs, with the most important paragraph first, and our paragraphs with the most important lines at the beginning, we will have a much better chance of the user absorbing our main message when scanning.
Call to action
At the end of our text, we can't leave our interlocutor hanging, unsure of where to go next. It's essential to provide the user with a call to action, such as giving them the option to purchase a product, hire our services, or suggest a relevant article.
That said, at BE Creativos, we offer a consulting service to all our clients, helping them with our extensive experience in creating functional, profitable, and cool websites. Visit our portfolio to see how we've helped our clients achieve the best possible web presence.
