Frontline Perspectives

People now produce as much information every two days as was produced “between the birth of the world and 2003,” as Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt puts it. That’s five billion gigabytes of information every 48 hours.

It’s no surprise that people also consume information differently than they used to. Usability expert Jakob Neilson says 79% of people skim websites and only 16% read every word. For many of us, it seems logical to target that 79%. But the 16% are the people who truly want to read what you have to write, so you don’t want to lose them.

Most people are probably familiar with the basics of copywriting for the web. You know — use subheads and bullets, keep sentences short, include a call to action, etc. All of these things help people quickly skim your content. But even if you follow those best practices, you can still end up making mistakes that will lose readers.

I recently stumbled upon a helpful list of things to avoid in web copy. I’ve paraphrased these from Craig Brewster, co-founder of your mum ux:

• Don’t just copy and paste printed material onto your web pages. It’s tempting to try to cut corners this way, but it’s better to develop unique web content instead.
• Don’t treat PDFs as a substitute for web copy. Your PDFs should reside on a page with its own copy.
• Don’t waste time introducing content in the first paragraph. Just jump straight into the facts. (I catch myself writing introductions all the time in first drafts.)
• Don’t put too much information in your links. State what your readers will find, and then let them find it.
• Don’t forget to update your content regularly to keep your readers coming back.

View Brewster’s full list of tips for writing for the web, and please add your own dos and don’ts in the comments below!