inkjuice

In my company, we’re reviewing the content on our Web site. One of my concerns is to make the writing on the site friendlier.

Friendly is a complex adjective. In Web design, it overlaps with usable. In writing, it overlaps with readable, which is part of being usable. It also includes a quality that’s hard to define objectively: an air of welcome, of lightness, of personal conversation.

Corporate sites can fail at friendliness by taking themselves too seriously. They bristle with marketing buzzwords. They strive to mention every feature of their product, rather than pinpointing what’s important to the reader. They don’t address the reader directly (’you’). They describe the product in abstracted terms instead of explaining its use in everyday situations. The reader’s need ought to be what justifies the site and its product. Yet this type of site often seems independent of the reader, justified by its own cleverness.

A friendly corporate site, by comparison, makes the need of the reader paramount: in its choice of detail, its attention to usability and the tone of its writing.

Aspects of friendliness

• Solve the reader’s problems. The reader isn’t interested in how great you are, except insofar as that relates to your ability to do something for her.

• Write how you speak. No one says, ‘The system supports concurrent users in a distributed configuration.’ They say, ‘People in different locations can log in at the same time.’

• Have a sense of humour. You don’t need to seed your site with jokes (particularly if you can’t tell jokes, which I can’t), but having a light style instead of ponderous seriousness helps the reader to feel positive about you.

• Avoid buzzwords. Terms like ‘best of breed’ and ’synergy’ are common on sites that target a B2B audience, for whom they function as proof that the writer knows that audience. They’re poor style, however, snce they have no concrete meaning at all. And they exclude some members of the real audience, which on the Web is always larger than the target audience.

• Chunk your content with headings, short paragraphs, bulleted lists, images and links.

• Exclude no one. Accessibility is vital. For the content writer, that means writing proper link text, explaining abbreviations, etc.

I’m still experimenting with the lighter style, finding a tone that balances friendliness with professional competence. I’m thinking particularly about the role, type and limits of humour on a corporate site.

(Photo by afreeta at stock.xchng.)