Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print because people read differently on the Web. Many internet users are looking for information, and if you make it easy to find on your website, they will thank you. If you make information or your message hard to find by burying what you actually want to say in the second or third paragraph, they may not stay on the site at all!
There is research to show that when people visit a website for the first time they decide within 20-25 seconds whether they are going to stay and read something or leave the website. Researchers have also done a lot of studies that suggest that web readers scan pages before they read anything, meaning they may scan right past your article if it doesn’t have a straightforward heading or introduction that includes key words about what you are trying to say. Everyone who’s observed, tested, or studied online reading agrees that people behave differently when online. When viewing a new page, they don’t read they scan.
They look at headings and subheadings first
they scan for
- hyperlinks,
- numbers,
- bullet points and
- keywords.
They also
- jump around,
- scrolling and
- clicking
their fingers never far from the browser’s “back” button. The word that best describes this behavior is ‘impatient’. So, if you want people to GET your message or FIND YOU or SIGNUP for something, your writing and presentation of your content – and making sure it is easy for users to find – is critically import.
So what about your content?
Well for many (the majority I would guess) churches and christian organisations, four of the key aims of having a website are so that people can:
- search (like with Google or Yahoo) and actually find your website
- get information about your church (ministries, programmes, service times, corporate/charity status)
- discover where you are physically located
- contact you if they need to (which can include anything from sending an email to enrolling in a programme or subscribing to a newsletter or becoming a donor).
And to make that possible and deliver that information through a simple website doesn’t need a book or 20 x A4 pages of text – so you need to approach your writing in a very different way than writing a sermon, or an essay or a thesis or even a good short story.
With several years experience of writing for the web and in particular editing other people’s material to use on websites, there’s a good chance that I can help if you would like me to. So if this is an area where you would like some assistance (or even if it’s just one of the things about developing or updating your website that is bothering you) please [button link="http://small-beginnings.net/contact/" color="black"] Contact me today![/button]
