Bill Myers

The secret to getting visitors to read your web pages and email

Want to make sure your web page gets read? Keep the page short, and remove hyped-up, 'marketese'.

A recent study by Jakob Neilsen revealed that people rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. 79 per cent of test participants scanned any new page they came across; reading only the headlines and subheads. If the page was long, and didn't include subheads, all but 16% of the testers would skip the page completely.

Another significant finding . . . the vast majority of testers would leave a page as soon as they encountered hyped-up, ' marketese'. The study found hyped up promotional language " imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyperbole to get at the facts".

The study's conclusions:

• Keep the text on your web pages concise, scannable, and objective
• use subheads to show significant text elements
• include bullet lists
• avoid marketing hype and puffery

Above all, keep in mind that web users are much less motivated to read long web pages since they can't know whether the site is relevant to their goals. If the page is long, difficult to read, or contains hype, they will go elsewhere.

Moral: Too many words on your web pages will drive visitors away.