People aren’t going to learn if you just give them the answers. This happens all the time in the forums –people post a question and someone comes along and gives them the code to paste in. That solves the problem but the poster doesn’t learn anything in the process.

With coding questions in particular I’ll often give people most of the answer, even writing out a step-by-step tutorial, but I won’t post the full code or a link to a working page. This way the user has to put things together themselves and figure out how things work. There was a really great post at Creating Passionate Users called “Cognitive Seduction and the “peekaboo” law”:

In learning, the more you fill things in and hold the learner’s hand, the less their brain will engage. If they don’t need to fire a single neuron to walk through the tutorial, lesson, lecture, etc., they’re getting a shallow, surface-level, non-memorable exposure of “covered” material, but… what’s the point?

(I totally love that blog. So sad that she’s no longer posting. It’s a must read if you’re interested in education and/or software development or something in between).

With the tutorial in question I came out with some samples of the code I would need to do something similar to what I really want to do. It doesn’t help me understand what those variables are doing and how I can use them in different ways. Not a tutorial.

See, it’s a short post for once. Aren’t you happy?

Why the Filler Text

Part of the reason why this happens is because we tend to think about design and architecture before content. Often designers will work with clients to define what pages are needed, then add the content later. A typical conversation might go like this:

Designer: We need some content for this page.
Client: Oh, well can’t we just write something to put there?
Designer: What should it say?
Client: I don’t know, just make something up.

So someone writes a bunch of filler without thinking about why people are visiting this page and what they want from it. This is a particular problem on University websites, I’ve found. This page used to consist of only the first line under the graphic. Why? Because the content editor didn’t think about what the purpose of that page was. It was an intermediary page leading to more detailed information. The first thought might have been that it’s just a filler page, it doesn’t need to have any content. I developed some content that provides an introduction to the rest of that section. In my new job I’ll be responsible for this page (and others like it!).

Of course, there’s also the SEO component — sometimes you’ll see filler text that is clearly there to provide keywords for search engines and not something that’s useful for human visitors.

How to Fix your Copy

This goes back to what I said about designers needing to develop some writing skills. Things like this happen because in most design projects there isn’t a dedicated copywriter.

As Nielsen says:

So, prune your initial draft of marketese and focus on answering two questions:

• What? (What will users find on this page — i.e., what’s its function?)
• Why? (Why should they care — i.e., what’s in it for them?)

I’d also like to go back to the 4 key home page usability questions raised by Steve Krug in Don’t Make Me Think!. Users need to know:

• What is this?
• What do they have here?
• What can I do here?
• Why should I be here — and not somewhere else?”

Your intro text should help them to answer those questions. Then, think about how you can help them in reaching their destination (the information they are looking for). Check your stats to find out which pages are most visited by users. Use an analytics program to find out what the most common navigation paths are. If you know that users are going to need certain information, provide it for them immediately rather than expecting them to find the links to it. If you’re trying to sell something, use this area to persuade.

There are many options for otherwise empty, filler pages. Think about what users need and what the goal of the page should be. If the page doesn’t have a goal, then maybe there’s a way to eliminate it.

Search Words vs. Company Words: Targeting Long-tail Searches

Enjoy!

P.S. My new laptop is here!! Well, it’s at home with Liam right now. I let him open it while I’m at work. Will post about that later

So whose job is it then?

Most web designers rely on the clients to write the copy. They are the people who know about what they need to write, so this is usually the most logical choice. The problem is that a lot of business owners aren’t very good at writing. A lot of people aren’t very good at writing. The client turns up with terrible copy (2 months late, of course) and the web designer publishes it as-is.

Who else could do the writing? If you had a SEO or marketing specialist that person might be an appropriate choice. Marketers and SEO’s seem to have a better understanding of the importance of words. However, most small projects don’t have a budget for a dedicated writer or SEO anyway, and those tasks often fall to the web designer.

Who’s left? The web designer. If no one else is able to write good copy, then the web designer should be able to offer that service, or at least connect the client with someone who can.

In my current position, I do the final copy editing. If someone needs something posted on the website they either give me some preliminary copy or just tell me what it needs to say. Then I edit it according to established web writing theory and my own expertise. I happen to be pretty good at writing – a lot web designers aren’t. But they should be

If you are interested in writing, Signal vs. Noise and Copyblogger are good sites to visit. My #1 tip: the best way to get better at writing is to read.

The words that people search with may not always be the words they would like to read when they arrive at a webpage.

The word “cheap” is a good example here. You probably don’t want to brand yourself as “cheap”. “Cheap” brings connotations of poor quality and bad service – something you probably want to avoid. Words like “affordable” or “low-cost” would be more more appropriate. But you can bet that people will be using the word “cheap” when they search for sites like yours.

Mr. McGovern, unfortunately, stops just when the idea starts to get interesting. You want to show people the nicer sounding words, but in order to rank for the search terms people will actually be using you need a way to show the simpler, cruder words to search engines. How do you develop a site that shows one set of words to people and another set of words to bots?

It’s a difficult problem. Google does not want you to show them different words from what they show to people. But, at the same time, they want to find the best results in their rankings. Or course, we all know that meta keywords are obsolete and underhanded methods such as hidden keywords are ignored. You could try to use off-page factors to target the simpler words but that is still branding yourself in a way you don’t want to be percieved.

It’s an interesting thing to think about, and I’m sure people who actually know about SEO would have more to say about it. One potential solution would be for search engines to be able to match what people enter with the words that marketers are using on the websites. So if someone entered “used car”, Google would know that this is the same as “pre-owned vehicle.” They already have spell checking functionality, so why not a thesaurus too?

Liam had another suggestion: rely on off-site directories and such to drive traffic to your site. So you get listed on sites that list “cheap web design” or whatever you’re selling, but do not include those words on your site. Liam also thinks that there’s no need to use the “nicer” words in the first place – just use the “crude” words to begin with. I’m not so sure about that: I think it’s very possible that people will react better to the nice words, depending on what you’re selling and who your audience is.

P.S. WordPress 2.1 is out and the new visual editor includes – you guessed it – spell check! Yay! I hope that editor works in Opera. I haven’t been using it because it didn’t work properly for me before.

The article also points out some problems encountered by people who learned to read using a non-latin alphabet (such as native Chinese or Russian speakers). This means that text needs to be very clear and easy to read – short line lengths, good spacing, reasonable font size, and no funky fonts.

I didn’t realize that there were so many ways to be ambiguous in the English language!