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 Our best guess would be that more than half of the words online are so out of date as to be completely worthless.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.
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