12 How Do I Write Web Content?
Until she got her first writing assignments, Angel had no idea that website owners put so much time, thought, effort, and money into developing their web content. Angel had always thought that websites were primarily graphical interfaces, with just enough text to send the viewer in the right direction to buy a product, order a service, obtain a license, or whatever else the website’s owner wanted the viewer to do. Angel had no idea that website owners paid tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of dollars just to build page after page of deep and rich text to educate their customers and clients, and confirm their reputation as trustworthy purveyors of truth and value. Yet Angel was glad that they did because she came to love writing web content.
Websites
Websites are the new bookstores and libraries. Websites are the current newspapers, magazines, billboards, and bulletin boards. Readers once had to pretty much get printed materials in their hands from brick-and-mortar stores or their roadside mailboxes to get their daily fill of text. No more. Readers now find endless digital content to read on websites, whether located through their web browser or scrolled in a social media feed. The internet is the modern library. Websites are the jillions of books on the shelves. If you’re worried about no one reading your published books and journal articles on the shelves of real libraries or available for order and delivery by postal service to your home, then instead write web content for clients who pay you to do so. Their willingness to pay you proves not only that someone is reading your writing on their websites but also that readers are acting on what you wrote. Consider the following tips for writing web content. Make web content a central part of your gig writing.
Organization
To be an effective web-content writer, you need to know a bit about how owners organize their websites. Websites begin with a landing page, generally the first place that a viewer reaches unless a search has linked them directly to a subordinate page. Landing pages identify the site while welcoming and attempting to satisfy the viewer’s interest, with blogs, announcements, and navigational aids. Those navigational aids direct the viewer to the website’s resources, from dropdown menus, sidebar menus, and linked graphics and text. Behind those menus and links may be not just dozens but even hundreds of other pages. Subordinate pages may themselves be landing pages for many additional pages accessed from sidebar menus and other links. Any one page may contain ten-thousand or more words of text on the page’s topic, through which the viewer can scroll in a long and leisurely or intense read. Websites typically have abundant internal links enticing a viewer to explore page after page on the same site. Don’t underestimate the volume, depth, complexity, and value of information that websites offer, and the writing opportunities that accompany that offer.
Purposes
The primary purpose of a website is to give its owner a presence in the digital marketplace. The owner’s subordinate purpose may be to offer and sell goods and services, solicit new or returning clients, promote customer relationships, recruit volunteers or employee talent, promote a cause or mission, build brand awareness or personal reputation, facilitate discussion, generate leads, build contact lists, entertain the bored, run for office, or simply to educate, encourage, or caution the public. But whatever call to action a website urges, whether for personal, business, or educational purposes, the website’s primary purpose remains to give the website owner a table in the internet’s grand bazaar so that at least a few of the zillions of internet views see the owner’s message. Plenty of other websites are simply cries in the digital wilderness, miniscule platforms from which frustrated authors or isolated advocates can claim their voices heard. Don’t underestimate the breadth and depth of the purposes owners pursue with their websites. Appreciate your privilege to write for websites.
Audiences
To write effective web content, you must know your audience and its affinities, preferences, interests, and purposes. To write the best web content, you might prefer to know the age, sex, education level, culture, marital status, family status, occupation, political party or leaning, hobbies, and favorite color, film, and ice cream flavor of your average reader. And that’s only a slight exaggeration. The more you know of your audience, the more you can adjust your writing’s reading level, content, tone, references, and marketing pitch to your readers’ interests. Writing web content for a law firm trying to reach physicians facing license disciplinary charges is a far cry from writing web content for a fairground trying to reach farm families to entertain at the fair. If you don’t already know your audience, then do your research. Put yourself in their shoes when crafting your web content and message.
Education
No matter whether your web content assignment involves a hard pitch, soft pitch, or no pitch at all, educating your readers is generally a key aspect of your assignment. One way or another, your writing needs to provide the website viewer with value, if not in the direct sale of a helpful product or service, then in providing the viewer with some answer, hint, direction, instruction, suggestion, guide, or encouragement. Entertainment might be enough, but not usually. Website viewers generally seek some form of useful information. Even if they have no specific purpose for the information they glean from their browsing, web viewers generally want to come away feeling wiser about the world or at least its digital representation. Thus, educate, inform, instruct, tutor, and teach. Don’t do so in a condescending manner. Some of your readers may know more than you do. But do your research, and bring whatever keen, accurate, valuable, and informative views you can to your writing. Send readers on according to your call to action, with the confidence that your writing has them in a better position already than they previously were.
Marketing
You should also know how hard or soft a marketing pitch around which to shape your writing, or whether to have any marketing angle at all. The client paying for your web content may direct you clearly on that subject. If, instead, the client leaves it up to you, then examine the website’s tone and the tone of competitor websites, to make your best judgment about how a potential customer or client would respond. But don’t hesitate to include a pitch. A great deal of website content is marketing material. Much of that marketing material is straight-up advertising copy, with little more than the offer and its price, terms, and delivery schedule. Much more of that marketing material is a fairly hard and direct pitch to buy the product or order the service, around educational information justifying the pitch. Yet websites also do a great deal of soft marketing, where the content is largely educational and the pitch only subtle and indirect. Let your client be the judge, and then you be the judge if your client has no opinion. But be sure that you’ve got the right pitch level if your primary role is to pitch.
Title
The first thing that a web surfer sees of your web content is its title. As in the case of blogs, web page titles play an important role in search engine optimization. Your title should generally include the key words and phrases that a web searcher would type into a browser’s query box. Web page titles don’t necessarily need to be as catchy as blog titles. In contrast to blogs, with web page content you’re not so much trying to capture the attention of a viewer surfing quickly past. You are instead trying to assure the viewer that they’ve landed on the right page to get the answer or information that they seek. Your web page titles should be even clearer, simpler, more declarative, and more direct than your blog titles. It’s okay to bore a web viewer with a landing page title, if the title convinces the viewer that they’ve finally found the right page. The same is especially true for the titles of subordinate pages to which the website’s main landing page links. Titles of subordinate pages may, with only a little more elaboration, read substantially like the dropdown menu or other link on the main landing page that sent the viewer to the subordinate page. Navigational clarity is the goal, not so much to capture or entertain.
Style
Educational and informational web content has a general style to it. That style emphasizes accessibility and clarity, consistent with web viewership’s surfing practices. A full page of nothing but dense text won’t invite a web surfer into your content. Instead, web style generally involves copious use of clear titles, headings, and subheadings, breaking text up into relatively small and easily managed chunks. Web page paragraphs may be a little longer than blog paragraphs, but not much. Three to five sentences might be best, unless your readers are professionals expecting greater depth. Use bullet points for lists rather than semi-colons in a long paragraph. Use italics and boldface font to emphasize priority text. Avoid long quotes with irrelevant clauses and details. Shorten long quotes with ellipses, eliding the irrelevant clauses and details. Don’t beat around the bush. Get to the point. Guide your reader to the priority information.
Structure
Like other forms of writing, web content can have a traditional structure to it. A good structure begins with the priority information. An article or essay might instead state the issue first, develop the argument, and then reveal the satisfying conclusion. Not for web pages. Begin web pages with the conclusion or other priority information that will meet the reader’s needs. After giving the reader what the reader wants and expects, then you may proceed to the issue that the priority information addresses, the context in which the issue arises, and the justification for your answer. In other words, flip the usual manner of rationalizing on its head. Web viewers may not need or want the justification. They may simply want answers. Give them the answer first, and then address the issue, context, and rationale in whatever greater detail your writing client wants, consistent with the web page’s goal. Landing pages, especially, should give answers, not issues and justifications. Save the analysis and other details for subordinate pages to which the landing page links. Let landing pages, subordinate landing pages, and further subordinate pages develop the full structure of the thought and field. That’s how viewers use websites, with click-through graphical and textual interfaces.
FAQs
Frequently asked questions (FAQ) pages are a common website feature. If your assignment is to write an FAQ page, your client may supply you with the FAQs that customers, clients, or others commonly ask. Your web research may also reveal common search queries and questions that web surfers ask, relative to your web page’s subject. But if you have any sense of the subject on which you are writing, you can likely generate sound FAQs. To do so, first project the content that you know that you need to write on the page’s subject, and then turn bits of that content into the questions the content would answer. In other words, turn your section headings and subheadings into questions. Then write clear, declarative, and relatively brief answers, generally each in a single paragraph. If you find that your answer grows beyond a reasonable paragraph length, then divide its subject up into two questions and answers. Using this process, you should be able to generate as many FAQs as your client’s assignment length requires. Use your head and common sense. Writing FAQs can be especially engaging, like having a dialogue with an imaginary client or customer where you just happen to have all the answers.
Tone
Website content also generally has a standard tone, somewhat different than the tone of either a blog or an article. Web pages need to be especially clear and concise. Your web content is trying to inform readers, not primarily to capture their attention or entertain them along the way. While blogs may seek to catch reader attention with curious events, weird and wonderful facts, or textual tricks like alliteration, rhyming, and entertaining incomplete sentences, web content generally eschews the cheap tricks in favor of straight content. Sentence length should generally be standard, neither overlong nor especially short and journalistic. Readability should generally be at that eighth-to-ninth-grade level of the average American reader, unless you know your audience to have a higher or lower average reading level. That average reading level means fewer long, non-standard words and generally the simpler and more-common way of expressing things. Don’t, in other words, fancy up your vocabulary to impress readers. Save that pretense for articles and essays. Keep your web content familiar and readable.
Reflection
Which would you prefer to write, blogs, web pages, articles, or books? What is the attraction to you of each writing form? Conversely, what do you not appreciate about each writing form? Do you learn new things when writing web content for clients? If so, do you value your opportunity to learn while having others pay for you to do so? Does the web content that you write have primarily marketing purposes, educational purposes, or other purposes? Do you express that purpose adequately, to your clients’ satisfaction? Are your web page titles clear and consistent with the key words and phrases that a searcher would use to find them? Are your web pages at the right reading level for your audience? How much do you know of your audience’s interests and affinities? Should you research your audience further? Do you write your web content in a standard tone? Do your web pages present priority information first before stating the issue and providing the justification or rationale?
Key Points
Websites host voluminous content inviting substantial writing work.
Websites use landing pages and subordinate pages for organization.
Websites have informational, educational, and marketing purposes.
Website audiences vary in ways that your web content must respect.
Website content generally includes an educational purpose.
Websites market in hard pitches and soft pitches aimed at credibility.
Title your web page with a clear title optimized for search engines.
Adopt a standard web content style focused on clarity and readability.
Structure web content with priority information first, the rest later.
Write websites FAQs based on client experience, research, or sense.
Keep web content tone clear, standard, accessible, and informational.