How to make your website copy look easy to get through

When visitors arrive on a page on your website, you want them to instantly find a reason to stick around.  You want to engage them.  You want to draw them into your copy.

When a visitor is hit with big paragraphs of copy, however, the visitor is not engaged.  So how do you deliver your content without hitting visitors with paragraphs of copy?

There are those at interactive agencies that believe they have a brand-new solution to this challenge, specific to websites, that they call "chunking"  (an unappealing -- and unappetizing -- term, to say the least .. .) 

But Direct Marketing has, for about the last 3 or 4 decades, referred to this technique as "nesting short copy within long copy."   And we effectively use this  technique across print ads, direct mailers, web sites, email messages -- yes, virtually anywhere a prospect might turn his or her gaze.  Because it turns out that prospects don't view content differently just because it's a website. 

We know that visitors to a website (as well as readers of magazines, newspapers, direct mailers, and email messages) scan, rather than read line-by-line, word-for-word.  To attract the scanning visitor, you want your content to look easy to get through.  So how can you break things up, so it looks more "friendly"?  Here are 6 ideas -- some purely design-related, and some copy-related:

1.  Box some elements.  Take your special offer, or a key benefit, or a new testimonial from a big name, and physically partition that section off from the rest of your content in a box.  Not only does the box help to emphasize what's in the box, it gives the eye some visual relief by breaking up the page.

2.  Use horizontal or vertical lines to further break up your page.  If you're not making use of the right column for special offers, your unique engagement elements, a feature on your newest products, or your latest tesitmonial, consider adding a right column area.   Consider creating a "main stage" area at the top of each page that is visualy set off from the bottom of the page. 

3.  Consider the use of "pull quotes" -- pulling some key points out of your copy and emphasizing them, by repeating those words larger than the rest of the content, in an area within the content.

4. Re-organize your content into Question-and-Answer (a la FAQs).  Visitors may read an entire page of question-and-answer and not realize they've read an entire page of copy.  When you rewrite your content in a question-and-answer format, it tends to help you write in a more convesational format -- exactly the way someone would really ask and answer the question.  And conversational writing is always easier to read.

5.  Break up your paragraphs -- use bullet points to emphasize key elements of your content to the scanning reader.  Make some paragraphs short -- a one sentence paragraph can really emphasize a key point.

6.  Break up long pages into several pages, when multiple topics are discussed on the long page. 

 

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