Usable content: What to write about
Written on July 3, 2007 – 12:39 pm | by admin
What’s the first thing a visitor to your web site needs to do? What’s the second thing? What must the readers absolutely do before leaving the page: Contact you? Make a purchase? Bookmark the site? In writing, focus on the reader’s tasks first. More than anything else, include a call to action, an opportunity for the user to take the most important step relating to your business goals.
Provide Value
Give the reader a reason to come to your site. Your site specializes in something. That means you are a specialist at something. Share your knowledge. Don’t just throw the reader a bone; make sure it has some meat on it. If you can’t pay your readers money, then give them information, tutorials, spec sheets, tips, links to other web resources, anything it takes to convince them to tell their friends that you have something on your site that they can’t get elsewhere.
Marketing
When you are talking about your products and services, be factual. Provide information, not hyperbole. It’s ok for your information to have character, style, and a point of view, but make your products relevant to the reader -state the benefits and uses. Make the site vital.
Quality of the Information
Users prefer information with legitimacy, information that is honest, accurate, up to date, and based on reliable, expert sources. Information should not only live up to these standards but needs to convey a sense of authority as well. Whenever possible, provide precise, detailed information and provide sources and dates. This is particularly appropriate in subject areas such as health and politics, where conflicting and misleading information is very common.
Keeping current
One of the most common problems is keeping the web site up to date. When calendars are not updated regularly, links pages have broken links, or pages have “Under Construction” signs for indefinite periods, the reader’s trust is undermined. After seeing so many web sites that have stayed online without ever having been updated, visitors are quick to conclude that an out-of-date site is one that will never be updated, and so they’ll seek other sites that are more current.
Writers need to plan for the effort required to maintain information that goes online. Some maintenance problems can be avoided by leaving out links that may be unreliable and omitting dates and events that won’t be removed in a timely fashion. Never label a site “Under Construction” –all web sites evolve over time. If it’s important to let the reader know that more will be coming, let them know what it will be and when it will arrive, as in “Coming Soon! Our product spec sheets will be online in June.” Then be accountable to the date you have promised. This lets readers know specifically when they can return to find the information they need. If you can’t guarantee the deadline, then don’t announce anything.
Source: Usability for the Web: Designing Web Sites that Work