Content is the reason why people visit your website. They are searching for information. If they can’t quickly find what they’re looking for, they leave.

Learning how to make your content easy to access, helps your visitors find what they’re looking for. They don’t want welcome messages or animated splash pages. They want to find what they came for… and quickly.

For writing effective content you must get in your visitors mind. Most of us believe that we know who our users are; We believe that we know what they’re thinking.

Unfortunately, we don’t realize this is false until we get closer to them; until we study them, their needs and their day to day life.

To understand your visitors you must create personas.

A persona is an imaginary human created by you. This persona has:

• Name
• Age
• Occupation
• Needs
• Skills
• And even a picture.

By creating this persona, your mind leaves its own ego and starts thinking according to this imaginary person.

The final goal of creating personas is to help you understand your visitor’s questions and create real life scenarios.

Everything on your website should fulfill a scenario

After you create a list of personas, it’s time to think of possible scenarios. Scenarios are short stories that give you a good sense of the people who come to your site; What they want to do at your website.

“Scenarios tell you the conversations people want to start” – Janice Redish, Letting go of the Words

I’m traveling from the U.S. to India next month. Do I need a visa?

My niece will be two years old next week. I’m looking for a cute dress to send to her.

If your content is not fulfilling any scenario, what’s the reason of having it? Change it to fulfill a scenario or delete it.

Breaking down long content helps visitors organize your website’s ideas

Whenever you see a “wall of text” keep in mind that:

• Your users won’t read it, or
• It will be a pain in the butt to read (and they’ll be swearing at you for making it so hard to read).

Break “walls of text” by making good use of these elements:

• Lists
• Tables
• Simplified text
• Sub headings

Lists
If you find yourself separating items by comas or enumerating items, convert those items into a list.

• It helps your visitors skim
• Makes the content easy to grab and go.
• Saves your users from having to create a mental list.
• Help visitors find the item they’re looking for faster.

Tables
Consider using tables when you need to compare numbers, have series of “if, then” or similar situations.

• Tables help you organize information in a more visual way
• It makes the content easy to grab and go.
• Visitors look for their question on the left column and when they find it, they look for the answer on the right column(s).

Simplified Text
It helps users understand what you mean by just reading it once. Simplify your text following these tips:

• Remove any welcome message.
  If you don’t want to remove it, think of what real life scenario the welcome message is fulfilling. Usually your answer will be none.
• Remove any fluff words that don’t mean anything.
  Words like ‘simply’, ‘basically’, ‘due to the fact that’, ‘at this point in time’ can be completely removed or changed for a simpler word. Reading your sentences without fluff words sound a lot simpler
  We are simply the best drug store. Our installations basically have all kinds of medicines for you.
• Change complicated or technical words for very simple ones.
• Write one to three short sentences for each paragraph, no more than that.
• Try to avoid using comas. Break the sentence into two or more sentences instead.

Sub headings
Also called sub titles. This helps users by telling them what they’re going to find after the heading. They can also make a general meaning of your document by only reading the sub headings.

Sub headings can be formatted like:

• Questions (E.g: “Why is good content necessary?”)
  Use questions when your user comes to the site with questions. It’s a very good technique for clicking with your visitor.
• Statements (E.g: “Good content helps visitors find what they’re looking for”)
  This technique helps to get a better understanding of what’s below the heading. Notice the main headings of this article are formated like statements.
• Action Phrases (E.g: “Write good content by following these basic rules”)
  Use this technique when you want to encourage your user to do something or follow a list of steps.
• Nouns (E.g: “Good Content Writing”)
  This format can be used in some specific cases; most of the time for labels. Nouns are not conversational, unlike questions, statements or action phrases.

Naming your links efficiently saves visitors from feeling lost

Naming links is one of the most important tasks while developing content. If you’ve read the phrase ‘click here‘, you’ve seen bad link names.

Knowing what to put between the <a> tag is very simple, just follow these rules:

• No ‘read more’, ‘click here’, ‘more’ links
  Users usually skim through the text by jumping from one link to the next. Having a more descriptive link would help users know where that link is going to take them. By having a ‘read more’ link, you obligate them to read what is before and after the link to understand what it is.
• Have links match your page titles
  If visitors click on a link called ‘How to find a girlfriend’ they want the page where they are redirected to be titled ‘How to find a girlfriend’. This not only supports consistency through your website but it also makes the user know right away that he’s in the right place.
• Use your visitors words
  Avoid using your website marketing lingo for links. If you create a new section called ‘volcano power’, give the link a more descriptive name. Use your visitor’s words. Users won’t understand what you mean until after they click the link.
• Use action phrases for links
  This is a great technique to encourage your users to do something. For example: If you’re linking to a page where users can write their own comment, don’t name the link “comments”. Name it something like “write a comment” or “send us a comment”. Whatever works best.

“Inverted pyramid” text makes visitors interested enough to continue reading

The inverted pyramid text is the total opposite of how we were taught in school. For this method you write the key message first. And you expand the subjects as you write. This technique is frequently used by journalists in newspapers.

Writing this way helps visitors quickly identify if they’re really interested or if they’ve read enough and want to stop.

There’s a similar technique for introducing new concepts to users. Let’s call it the known->unknown technique.

To use the known->unknown technique you start the paragraph with something the users already know and introduce something new in the second sentence. Then, in the start of the next paragraph you use the information that you introduced in the second sentence of the previous paragraph.

It’s easier to see it in action than to explain it. I’m going to use an example from Janice Redish’s book, Letting go of the Words (again):

Notice the first line of the first paragraph talks about something the user would already know if he’s looking to import yams into the US. The second line of the first paragraph introduces new information, indicating the yams need to be fumigated.

In the second paragraph, fumigation is already old information for the user, so it’s used to start the paragraph. Then the second sentence introduces new information.

Using this method makes users feel a lot more comfortable with what they’re reading and saves them from feeling lost in the process. It also helps educate them about unknown subjects.

Where can I find more about content writing?

Most (if not all) of this information was taken from Janice Redish book, Letting go of the words. It’s an excellent book that I recommend all web developers and everybody related to read.

Of course there is a lot more detail in the book. It will teach you, using a lot of real life examples, what I just mentioned here.

My writing skills still suck, but at least now I’m able to identify bad content and improve it by 10000%.

I also recommend that you read DON’T MAKE ME THINK by Steve Krug. A really well done book that talks about helping your users understand what the hell you’re trying to say and lots about web usability.