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How to Feed Content-Hungry Site Visitors
By Leslie O'Flahavan and Marilynne Rudick
Contributing Writer
Article Date: 01.16.03
Writing good
web content is a lot like planning a big dinner party. You're looking forward
to having lots of guests, but you're not sure about when they'll arrive or how
hungry they'll be. You know Deborah will only nibble on the salad, Laura will
snack on the chicken, and Dan will cheerfully devour everything you serve. As
an experienced party planner, you'll accommodate your guests' diverse appetites.
A good web writer does the same thing - accommodates the appetites of all content-hungry
visitors by providing different amounts of content for different users.
Web readers are known to be both hungry and impatient. To satisfy their need to find what they're looking for, you have to write concisely. But if you only give web readers factoids, you won't answer their questions about your organization or topic. Happily, as a web writer, you have the flexibility to provide content in a variety of sizes and to let visitors choose the amount of information that will satisfy them. In our Writing for the Web classes, we call this writing concept the bite, the snack, and the meal.
The CEO's Speech: Three Ways
Let us show you how to provide a bite, a snack, and a meal with a real-life example.
You've been asked (told) to put your CEO's keynote speech up on the web. The edict
from on high is "Don't change a word!" The lengthy speech details the research
your company, PetersMed, has done on the effectiveness of the new chicken pox
vaccine. The CEO, Sam Peters, concludes by proposing national legislation requiring
the vaccine. You know that some web readers will want to read the entire speech,
the meal, and perhaps even print it out.
But you know that other visitors don't have the appetite for the entire speech. Some visitors are satisfied with knowing what it's about, the bite, and others are satisfied with a concise summary of the speech, the snack.
The Bite: A Headline with a Message
"So what did Peters say?" Some site readers only want the bottom line and they
want it short. They're satisfied with just a bite, but they prefer something hardy
to "lite." On the web, the bite is a headline. You might be tempted to cheat and
use the original speech title for your bite. But the title for CEO Peters' speech
was PetersMed's Research on Chicken Pox Vaccine. The original title isn't enough
to satisfy. You want your readers to get the entire message of the speech from
the bite. A satisfying bite would be this powerful message headline: CEO Peters
Says Research Supports Mandatory Chicken Pox Vaccination. And you can make the
bite work even harder for you by making it the link to the full text.
The Snack: A Concise Summary
What about those who are moderately hungry? They want a snack , a good summary,
2 or 3 sentences long. The easy way to write the snack would be to lob off the
first paragraph of the speech and call it a snack. But in this case, you'd just
get the CEO's opening joke. And in most instances, using the first paragraph of
a print document doesn't make for a satisfying snack. Many articles begin with
an anecdote or a provocative hook not a summary.
Here's a satisfying snack that summarizes the CEO's speech: "PetersMed's four-year study of the chicken pox vaccine shows that it reduces cases of the childhood illness by 80 percent. CEO Sam Peters supports national legislation, and efforts by the American Academy of Pediatrics, to make the vaccine mandatory for school-age children."
Presenting the Bite, Snack, and Meal
How will you present these three versions of the same content at your site? Try
using the bite as the headline for the snack, the summary. Link the bite to the
meal, the entire document, by making the headline hot. For an example, take a
look at the website for HandsNet, Inc. [http://www.handsnet.org]
an organization that supports online collaboration in the human services community.
Read the snack under each hypertext headline (the bite) or click the headline
to take you to the meal.
Or you could choose to present the three versions all on one
page: a headline, a summary beneath the headline or as a sidebar,
and the full version. For an example of this kind of web writing,
go to www.abc.com and click on the Technology section [http://abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/].
You'll find technology news: a series of headlines followed
by article summaries. But click on any article headline and
you'll go to a page that offers all three content amounts -
the headline, the summary, and the full article.
Spicing Up the Meal: Add Hot Links
You can add spice to the meal, without changing a word, by adding hypertext links.
What else might the reader of the speech want to know? More about the CEO? Link
to his bio. Background on the company? Link to your site's About Us page. Results
from PetersMed's research on chickenpox? Provide a link to your report. Additional
questions? Link to a knowledgeable company contact.
The Taste Test: Less is More
Ironically, the test of good web writing might be that your visitor doesn't have
to read all you've written to get your point. If your bite and snack are effective,
your reader can choose not to read your meal. In web writing, the highest praise
might be: "I didn't read the whole thing."
About the Author:
Marilynne Rudick and
Leslie O'Flahavan are partners in E-WRITE , a training and consulting company
in the Washington, D.C. area that specializes in online writing. Rudick and O'Flahavan
are authors of the book Clear, Correct, Concise E-Mail: A Writing Workbook for
Customer Service Agents. http://www.writingworkbook.com/
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