Why you should treat your website visitors like teenagers

If you want your website to do the best for your business, treat your site visitors like teenagers. That doesn’t mean you need to write “LOL” or “OMG” every other sentence. What you do need to do though, is write your website in Plain English so that a teenager with moderate language skills could understand it. This applies even if you work with accountants, surveyors or well-qualified management consultants.

You see, when people read things on the internet they are in a hurry. Often, that’s why they use the internet in the first place. Whatever it is you’re looking for these days, the chances are you can key it in to Google, hit enter and see hundreds of thousands of results, even for a niche search term.

And with so much information at their disposal, naturally people whiz through it, taking in only the main points. So, the more complicated your web copy is, the less people will understand it. Can you imagine for example, reading a page of an academic journal or a dissertation paper at the same speed that you read a website? You simply wouldn’t be able to take it in properly.

Academic journals use long, often complex sentences and large abstract words and ideas. All of which are very difficult to read at speed and properly comprehend. Simple, readable sentences are much more easy to read and understand online. Here are some quick, useable tips to make your web copy easier to read.

• Use short sentences, with simple words. Read your web copy out loud, it should sound like something that someone might actually say, rather than a long formal announcement or speech.
• Avoid abstract terms and say what you actually offer. For example instead of saying that you “deliver business value through sustained performanceand capability improvements for our clients”, why not just say that you can train businesses to get better results and to grow? Some websites use sentences so long that by the time you reach the end you’ve forgotten what the start was about. This goes against what psychologists describe as cognitive load theory.
• Analyse your content to see its readability. The American ‘Flesch Kincaid’ readability test gives a ‘reading age’ to your content. It ranks its readability as a percentage, and also gives it a ‘grade level’, based on the grades (year groups) in American schools. You can assess your website’s readability here and ideally you should aim for readability of at least 60% and a grade score of 9 (the lower the grade score the better). If you use Microsoft Word 2007 you can even assess the readability of your copy when running a spell check. Find out how here.

The easier you make your website to read, the more people will understand it, and the more likely they are to want your product or service. Personally, I’ve always subscribed to the view that if you can’t describe something simply, you don’t know it well enough. Explaining things simply is a great opportunity to differentiate yourself from some of the boring, bland information that’s out there.

Related posts:

1. How do you get website visitors?
2. How does a website work?
3. How does a website work? (part 2)