Most websites exist to hold words, process words, and promote products and services primarily with words. They are fundamentally important in online communications, yet they are generally one of the poorest components in most sites.
Words play a central role in defining personality, whether spoken or written. Most people can identify the best brands purely by the written style of their communications.
Online, words have been under-valued since the internet's earliest days. In most cases, content is dumped into websites under the banner of 'repurposing'. In truth, this means that it has been copied and pasted from another source, usually printed, with little or no thought as to its effectiveness online.
Every established site has content living in, and attached to, its pages. In most cases, it does a poor job of representing its owner. To re-create a site successfully, real thought needs to be given to both the high-level stylistic use of language, the brand 'tone-of-voice', and the low-level written content that populates all the pages.
Written tone of voice is perhaps the most important and under-used communication activity available today. Defining high-level standards for the use of language is central to delivering a consistent brand personality, yet it is still rarely used.
Picture this: you meet a contact from a supplier on a regular basis as part of your job. Each time you meet, you catch up with his latest news, he tells you about his new services, and he provides you with detailed information on some of the aspects of his business that you've been interested in.
Now imagine that each time you meet, he talks to you in a different accent. Each service he discusses sounds like it comes from a different company. One time he's pushy, the next more reserved. And you can never tell whether he speaks for himself or his entire organisation. You find it hard to figure him out.
This would be decidedly unnerving. You may decide not to meet him again. At the least, it's unlikely you'd be very impressed. And the lasting impression would be of an organisation that is not very 'together'.
This is a simple real-world example of how a consistent tone-of-voice affects the end-customer.
The written content of many websites is exactly like this: lacking consistency on almost every level, and presenting a sloppy, unprofessional face to its customers. It's usually very hard to determine what type of organisation is behind the words.
Written tone of voice is an accessible service that any organisation can benefit from. We use it to define the stylistic guidelines that any type of copy can be written within. Online it should affect everything: menu titles; messages; summaries; banners; descriptions; and so on. It makes a dramatic difference to the quality of everything that customers experience.
At the other end of the scale, low-level content needs constant attention. Tone of voice issues aside, a brief look around most sites will demonstrate how poor most written content is. Why? There are numerous reasons.
Sometimes it's because a site is contributed to by a wide range of people all of whom think they can write well. Or a lack of central editorial control. Sometimes just a simple lack of effort. Usually, it's due to a lack of skills in one way or another.
At a high level, words have the same effect online that they do in any other media. At a lower, more detailed level, people consume words very differently online. So copy for websites needs to be written differently, not just copied from something written for somewhere else.
Without writing a detailed rule-book here, there are some basics that need to be considered in all cases.
Online words need more structure. Reading on-screen is less comfortable and we scan more. So we need more clues and hints and more small snippets for our eyes to latch onto before we read longer passages.
Long articles are ok, but long paragraphs are not. Overly-dense copy is hard to navigate on-screen. Summaries are important to help people choose what to read, as are the titles that precede them.
Editing is important: crucially important. Shorter, sharper copy, particularly for business communications, will always pay dividends. Less time required to read the same information will always win out over linguistic beauty online.
Above all, the most important criteria for online writing is that it is engaging, accessible and valuable. Our best guess would be that more than half of the words online are so out of date as to be completely worthless. Another 30% are so poorly written that they are never read or understood properly. A further 10% could be considered acceptable and of some value: mainstream quality.
That leaves 10% that are professional, well-written and of real value to their target readers.
The aim of every redesign project should be to write, re-write, edit, refine and remove content until everything left is consistent and useful. Get into that 10% and customers will read what you have to say and may actually believe what you tell them.