Writing for the Web: Less Is More
The great paradox of electronic communications is that people expect more information, but they actually want less, in easy-to-digest chunks. Those clever analogies that work so well in print tend to flop in cyberspace.
Short attention spans mean that if you don’t grab readers immediately, either by answering a question or asking an intriguing one, they’ve already lost interest and clicked away.
Let’s take an example of a piece written for print about foot surgery. This is a fairly conventional lead for magazines and newsletters, attempting to draw readers in with a personal experience:
At first, Claudia kept her bunions in check by wearing flat shoes with wide toes. But when the pain reached the point where she could no longer go on hikes with her birding group, she decided to take action and see an orthopedic surgeon.
Now pretend you’re searching the Web because your bunions hurt, and this is what you land on. Your response is likely: Who the heck is Claudia and why do I care if she can’t go bird-watching? I want to know if I need surgery, how long it takes to recover and where I can go to get it done. I’ll go back to Google because there are more than 160,000 results for bunion surgery and one of them has to be more useful than this!
Your bunion sufferer is more likely to spend time on a site that answers questions in a straightforward fashion, like this:
What are bunions?
What are the treatment options?
What can I expect from surgery?
Where can I find a surgeon who specializes in bunions?
Lesson learned: Save flights of creative fancy for your novel, and write Web copy in short, bulleted chunks that are scannable. Respect your readers’ time, and always keep in mind that they have many other options a mouse click or two away.
