Thursday, November 22, 2007

A Little Help from Our Friends

We’ve worked on lots of other companies’ websites, but this was our first serious plunge into creating our own. We came up with the design and copy, while Susie and Travis from Hop Studios made the whole thing happen (i.e., all the tricky programming, design refinements, and behind-the-screens magic).

Not only were Susie and Travis pros at the technical side of things, they got the idea of what we were aiming for and helped us nurture it along. Just as important, they’re great people who are fun to work with. We highly recommend them.

We’d also like to thank all our clients who wrote testimonials about what it’s like to work with Turner-Riggs. You’re busy people, and we appreciate your having made the time to help us out. We’ll look at them every day—we might even frame them!

Muchos gracias, all.

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Writing Web Copy that Gets Read

When you’re creating content for the web, your job is to make it easy for visitors to your site to (1) want to read your stuff, and (2) read your stuff.

In other words, content should be both interesting and well presented (i.e., geared to the unique way people absorb textual information on web pages).

Writing Interesting Content

Writing interesting content makes it easy for visitors to want to read your stuff. Interesting content is:

• In plain language, with no pretentious words or marketese
• Relevant to your target audiences (i.e., think about their interests as much as your own)
• Written with flair and personality, using strong, active structure and verbs (see ”Knockout verbs” at blogthecat.ca)
• Typo free and grammatically correct

Presenting Content to Best Effect

Every time I write web copy, I remember three percentages I got from Jakob Nielsen:

1. 79% of users scan the page instead of reading word for word
2. Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper
3. Web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent

The implications of these percentages are huge. To make it easy for visitors to read your stuff:

• Use short sentences
• Break text into short paragraphs—many more than you would use when writing for print
• Rely frequently on bulleted and numbered lists
• Make sure your text comes across in short line lengths (like newspaper columns)—anything longer than three inches is too long
• Scatter subheads liberally throughout each page or entry
• Bold particularly important words or phrases (but don’t overdo it)

I could go on and on, but I won’t. I’m writing for the web, after all.

Monday, November 19, 2007

To the Blog!

Welcome to the Turner-Riggs blog, where we’ll be talking about anything and everything that interests us professionally and that we think might help our clients and colleagues. We’ll be referencing our own experience, linking to others’ examples and points-of-view, and generally providing a forum for ideas on marketing and communications.

Our goal: posting nuggets of knowledge once a week. The likely reality: a slightly more flexible schedule, with nuggets intact. Sometimes Craig will post, sometimes Kiley will. On really good days we’ll combine forces.

We look forward to sharing our ideas with you. We hope you’ll respond to them whenever you can with your comments, questions, and arguments.