Less is best when you write for the web. But it’s not as easy as it looks. Writing for the web is not simply a matter of cutting and pasting your corporate brochure into the relevant pages of your website. Nor is it the place for your marketing department to wax lyrical in a creative stream of consciousness.

So what does writing for the web involve?

Sell the proposition: keep it short

It’s about capturing the attention of your audience in the few seconds they spend scanning your page.

Every word on your site must earn its place. Convincing clients that less is best is one of the more difficult tasks I face as a web copywriter. When a client agrees to a fee for copywriting, the idea that they’re only paying for about 200 words per web page (which doesn’t look like much on paper, believe me) is often hard to grasp.

But when you consider that those 200 words are carefully selected and crafted to capture the reader’s very short attention span, you get an idea of how hard it can be.

Consider this. 79% of web users ‘scan’ pages, and only 16% read them word for word (Jakob Nielsen).

A web user wants to find the information they need as quickly as possible. If they have to wade through dense paragraphs of information to find what they’re looking for, chances are you’ll lose them before you’ve finished your first marketing punchline.

When you’re writing for the web, remember these pointers:

• Start the page with the conclusion
• Improve scannability: use bolding and bulleted lists
• Avoid creative copywriting: keep it simple
• Headings and sub-headings as statements of fact

The ‘brevity’ mantra doesn’t always apply

Consider this article. You’ve drilled down to this page from the home page – or scored a direct hit from Google – and you’re here because you want to learn more about how to write well on the web. You might be printing the article out to file in your ‘useful business tools’ folder (I can only hope). In short, you want more than just a few sound bytes of information.

I hope this article has been useful to you, and welcome your feedback.