Some were good, some were bad, of course. But what struck us most of all was the alarming number of sites that insisted on a feed or regularly updated slot in a prominent space on the homepage entitled “News”.

One of the tenets of our web-writing best practice is that “news should really be news”. But none of the stories on these sites are really news at all. This is problematic, we’d argue, for several reasons:

1. You’re giving users what you care about, not what they care about
Whether you provide financial services or sanitary products or drama workshops, the chances are that of all the kinds of content that people come to your site for, your idea of news is very low down their list. The fact that you’ve appointed a new sales director for the North of England, or that you’ve applied for a new ISO standard, or that one of your team has raised a load of cash running up a mountain on one leg, is simply not that interesting to anyone outside your organisation.

Perhaps you think such a story is important because it speaks about the kind of culture your staff enjoy, or shows how much you care about quality. But really, no. Your average web user just doesn’t care.

Why? Because they are in a hurry, and they are after answers to much more fundamental questions: Do you stock the product I’m after? Do you understand my needs? Can I trust you? Are you cheaper than that competitor site I just looked at? How do I get I touch? Do you deliver? Where’s the information I want? And so on.

As web owners, your job is to identify these priorities, find the ones that coincide with your own, and plan your content accordingly. You have limited space, your users have limited time; new sales directors and sponsored runs are a waste of both.

2. You’re not in the news business – and you’re not being search-friendly
When you start using a word like “news” online, you place yourself in immediate competition with the likes of Reuters, the BBC and CNN.

Few people will ever search for your news, and if they did they’d probably search for news about you on one of these big players who are actually, like, real news providers.

So whenever you use the word “news” in a title tag or headline, you’re using one of the most fought-over words in all Googledom. And you’re passing up on an opportunity to use a keyword or phrase as part of one of those vital content elements that people might actually search for in relation to you and your products and services.

So you’re pretending to be something that you’re not, and a the same time you’re reducing your chances of being found by people likely to care about what you really are.

3. You’re producing smelly fish
It’s bad enough reading irrelevant internally-focused anecdote masquerading as topical items of mass interest on a homepage; then you turn to the Press or News section proper and you see where all these stories have gone to die.

As content guru Gerry McGovern puts it in his latest, Killer Content: “The web is full of filler content… The press release – a staple of most corporate websites – is a good example of print content that gets published because it’s the easy way out. Originally, press releases were not meant to be published. Instead, they were supposed to be released to the press as a story ‘hook’ – something that might get them interested in writing a story in their publications.

“Your website is your publication. You should be taking your press release ideas and turning them into compelling stories that communicate clear messages your customers care about. Simply putting press releases up is the lazy way out. Most of your customers care to read your press releases about as much as they’d care to open a bag of two-week-old fish.”

Of course, some of that “news” content may be usable, in some form. An award win or professional accreditation can go in your About us or Testimonial section, while staff achievements or interests can perhaps be reflected in your careers area. It all needs thinking about, working on, turning into fresh content users can stand the smell of.

Certainly much of the writing for the web we do isn’t creative in the sense that there’s lots of scope for agonising puns or cryptic references or exhibitions of individual flair. There aren’t obvious opportunities for web writers to show off or do work that can go straight into their books, which is what I suspect the comments I’ve heard tend to mean. But then this is perhaps a rather limited definition of “creative”.

I once heard a talk by content guru Gerry McGovern in which a member of his audience complained that the tone of voice his clients required him to write in was “boring”. But the clients in question were banks and other financial institutions. As Gerry pointed out, banks look after our money; we look to them to be sound and reliable and responsible above all, not wacky dispensers of gags. What the audience member called boring was in fact tonally appropriate.

And being creative online is just about being appropriate in this way. It’s about coming up with words that help your clients meet their objectives while at the same time providing users with the content they might actually want to read. It’s about coming up with interesting ways to talk about things that often aren’t obviously interesting. It’s about gaining people’s attention when they’re pushed for time, or can’t see why you should be any different from the rest, or don’t believe there’s anything new to know about a particular subject.

All these things require talent, skill, thought, imagination… creativity.

Like a cathedral or an episode of Emmerdale, websites are collaborative projects, where individual efforts must be made subservient to the greater good of the whole. Online, writers must learn to leave their ego at the door. Between the website’s consumers and the website’s owners there should be an uninterrupted flow of content, seamlessly bridging user needs and marketing priorities. There is no place for the ego of the creative, no place for individual “style”. (Style, incidentally, can be overrated. Asked why he originally wrote Waiting for Godot in French rather than in his native English, Samuel Beckett replied: “In order to write without style.”)

This is a different kind of creativity, the kind that involves immersing yourself totally in the needs of your audiences so that you disappear and only the right content remains. That content should belong naturally to the site — done well, it shouldn’t be possible to tell which author did which bit.

Allied to this is the issue of parameters. Artists and craftspeople often say that constraints are creative, that working at the edge of rules produces the most interesting results. Well, web writing is full of parameters to test the creativity of any writer: character counts for headlines, search guidelines for copy, pay-per-click constraints, corporate style guides and more. Finding interesting copy solutions that do the job without busting these limits often requires real ingenuity.

Artists of the written word have for centuries agonised about what Virginia Woolf called the “eternal struggle with form”. A harmonious blend of style and substance, of form and content, is a classic hallmark of a satisfying work of art. Online, where people scan read at motorway speed, form virtually IS content. The need to structure web content in ways that intuitively highlight meaning and encourage engagement is perhaps the greatest creative challenge of all.

Web writing isn’t for everyone. But for those interested in doing it right, it’s almost never boring and often very creative. But then we would say that.

The standfirst goes by many names: the sell, subdeck, snippet, summary para, promo para, intro text, even ‘blah blah copy’.

At Sticky Content, we call them standfirsts and we mean the few short lines of text, often in bold, which sit between the headline and the body copy, acting as a bridge between the two.

Often coded as an H2, a good standfirst expands on the headline, gives users a fuller idea of the piece to come, and hooks them into reading more. Online, these signposting paras are often completely overlooked and yet they are surprisingly important. Here’s 5 reasons why…

1. Standfirsts are often what a search engine displays
If you don’t supply meta descriptions – and if you write them properly, standfirsts make great meta descriptions – then what will Google use as the two lines of text it inserts beneath your title tag on its results page? The usual answer is that it’s the couple of lines of text surrounding the key search terms on a page. Which (again if you write them properly) is likely to be your standfirst. So your standfirst is a powerful SEO tool.

2. Standfirsts make people want to click on your content
If your standfirst is picked up as an organic search snippet, it will be read by users thinking about which item in a list of search results to click on. If it’s written to be engaging, on-brand and informative, it’s likely to increase your clickthrough rate, or at least to raise the quality/targeted nature of your traffic.

3. Standfirsts save you time by doubling up as promo paras, links and meta descripts
A headline and a standfirst should be written together as a single self-contained unit of meaning. They shouldn’t overlap too much, still less repeat each other (a terrible waste of crucial space). They can then be easily be lifted out and dropped elsewhere on your site, or on affiliate sites, as a teaser to promote a piece of content. Or as the anchor text for the link back to that content, or both. They can also be used as meta descriptions. All great ways to save yourself from the kind of constant rewriting of those ‘almost the same but not quite the same’ promotional lines of text, which decrease the usability and accessibility of so many sites.

4. Standfirsts make copy more usable

Intro text [= the standfirst] serves the same purpose for an interior page as the homepage does for the entire site and the tagline does for the homepage… people need to know what they are getting into before they dive in…. A brief introduction can help users better understand the rest of the page.

(Jakob Nielsen, www.useit.com)

5. Standfirsts are how we’re used to reading (and they make us read more)
Newspapers and magazines have presented content using the head + standfirst approach for decades. A headline on its own can rarely summarise a page adequately; we’re instinctively used to scanning the two together to get a full sense of the gist of an article.

It’s a powerful convention. And as print shows us again and again, a standfirst should never be a dry comprehensive summary or some generic feelgood filler copy. It should be targeted and focused, it should tease, sell, engage you to read on, throw out a question, make a promise, threat or opportunity that the body copy below goes on to answer.

Then all you have to do is to write great, web friendly copy which doesn’t dash the reader’s hopes. Over to you…

[This post originally appeared on e-consultancy. Want to learn more about headlines, standfirsts and how to use them to help your readers? Sticky Content runs regular writing for the web training courses: check www.stickycontent.com/training/ for the next set of dates.]

Some corporate sites use lengthy (and wordy) disclaimers to let readers know when they’re about to follow a link leading to an external site.

You know the sort of thing: “You are now about to leave the Madeup Corporation site. Madeup Corporation takes no responsibility for any of the content, links or any transactions made via the external site. Any information you might find on the external site is not endorsed in any way by Madeup Corporation or any of its subsidiary companies or websites. Thank you for visiting the Madeup Corporation site.”

Sometimes it can seem a bit excessive – this is the internet, after all. A link that goes somewhere else is hardly the biggest surprise.

But it’s just as odd to come across a corporate site, as I did recently, that doesn’t tell you when a link goes to another site. In this case the link led somewhere that didn’t look like the home site, didn’t really match the link description and had a puzzling lack of breadcrumb trail navigation.

This perplexing “where am I?” feeling isn’t something web copy should engender in users.

In particular, be up-front with your users when you link to external ecommerce sites. Like it or not, readers are likely to see this as an endorsement of what’s being sold there – fine if you want to recommend a partner, of course, but that’s not always the case.

I think disclaimers do have their place – not so that companies can cover themselves, but to aid navigation and orientate users. They don’t have to be long and legalistic – a simple “You’re now leaving our site. Because we don’t own the site you’re going to, our terms and conditions don’t apply there,” will do.

You can register for the show online, and entry is free.

Opening times

• Tuesday 29 April 2008, 09.30 - 17.00
• Wednesday 30 April 2008, 09.30 - 17.00
• Thursday 1 May 2008, 09.30 - 16.00

Venue: Earls Court 2, London, Warwick Road, SW5 9TA (How to get there)

On 27 May and 1 July we’re running our usual double-whammy: Writing for the web in the morning, and Writing for search in the afternoon.

On 24 June we’re introducing a new course, Writing for email, in the afternoon session, aimed at getting your customers opening, reading and acting on your emails. Writing for the web runs as usual in the morning.

You can book one half-day course, or attend both on the same day for a reduced rate. They’re designed to work together so that writing for search and writing for email build on what you’ve learned in writing for the web.

Course outlines, pricing and how to book

That Sainsbury’s sign is a great example of how looking again at the language we take for granted to represent us can yield surprisingly effective results.

For one thing, “customer service” is a tired phrase, internally-focused and distancing. To talk of “customers” is to refer to a third party when a clear you-we relationship is what’s going on. “Customer service” is not exactly a phrase that lives up to its own billing.

For many of us, too, the Customer Service desk is traditionally a slightly forbidding place where you go to haggle for a refund when you’ve lost the receipt. (I note that behind the desk the refund policy is very clearly and helpfully displayed.) But in fact this desk is there to help anyone with anything that simplifies or improves their interaction with the store — from asking where the catfood is to making a suggestion about the traffic jams in the car park to seeing if anyone has handed in your daughter’s woolly hat (they hadn’t).

Which is why the deceptively simple phrase “here to help” is so clever. It works on two levels:

1. as a physical marker: here, literally, is where you come when you need our help
2. as a statement of intent: our aim is to provide whatever assistance you need

This warmly embracing phraseology will no doubt attract more people to the desk than before. But that means more people who will find their way around the store, more satisfied customers, more queries answered. Both sides of the relationship can only benefit.

Online, a phrase like “here to help” probably needs some work from an SEO point of view, and it doesn’t quite have the same “physical marker” effect. But look again at your buttons and labels and headlines: are they as warm, helpful and instantly informative as they could be? Is there a better way to say ‘About us’ or ‘Services’ or ‘Resources’ or ‘Features’ or ‘Other news’ or ‘Library’? You know there is…

The most successful projects we work on at Sticky Content manage to uphold the equal importance of design, technology and text.

They plan their copy requirements early on, invest in a content strategy, information architecture and strong, scannable, usable web copy formats.

Yet still a significant number of clients call us two weeks prior to relaunch and ask us to replace their lorem ipsum with something cobbled together from their old site and any old marketing collateral they happen to have lying around.

To me (and I would say this) the web is a still largely a word-driven medium.

Eye-tracking surveys have shown for yonks how users begin by screening out images, scanning instead for key messages and signposts in headers and links.

Text is fast to fix, usually cheaper than design or technical work and can show immediate ROI.
So why do so many site owners forget about text until the last minute?

To demonstrate the cost-effectiveness of good web copy, I’m currently inviting five site owners to volunteer for text-only fixes.

Clients who want to test the effectiveness of simply changing the text on their website.

While we do optimise copy for organic search, this is not primarily an SEO exercise, so I’m looking for sites which have a clear call to action for customers, where copy changes can be measured through the resulting rise (or fall) in specific customer activities.

If you think you might have a site (or an area of a website) that is ripe for a rewrite, please give me a call on 020 7704 3232. I hope to present the resulting case studies at Internet World in May.

In the meantime, here’s our top six most underrated forms of digital copy. The ones we think warrant far more attention than they often get.

1. Web forms. The tiny strings of instructional copy that sit around the transactional areas of your website. Pure gold dust. When carefully crafted these can seriously affect your online ROI. So why leave in the legacy copy keyed in by the programmer?
2. Top level navigation buttons. Q: Why are there so many buttons unhelpfully named ‘Products’ or ‘Services’? A: Because the designer only left an eight character space. Beauty over ‘meaningfulness’? Wouldn’t happen in offline marcoms…
3. Snippets. Whether these are search snippets or what’s visible in an email viewing pane, these words can make your click-through rates soar or plummet.
4. Anchor text. Even if you set aside the effect of well-written links on SEO and accessibility, anchor text is still key to usability. It enables users to orientate themselves quickly and encourages the swift pursuit of key calls to action.
5. Landing pages. You spend all that money driving me here and then there’s no call to action? No attempt to match messages with the traffic drivers? No clear forward path?
6. Adwords. What is it about SEO that an appearance on the first results page is deemed successful? Not if your copy is so dull, or woolly that no one wants to click on it…

Agree/disagree? Post your own comments on underrated web copy here.

The courses run on 28 and 29 January 2008: Writing for the web in the morning, and Writing for search in the afternoon. You can book one half-day course, or attend both on the same day for a reduced rate. They’re designed to work together so that writing for search builds on what you’ve learned in writing for the web.

Course outlines, pricing and how to book

That’s elegant variation, and you might think it’s a Good Thing. I was certainly taught so, in journalism school.

On the other hand, as a web writer you might be asked by a client to optimise your copy for a “keyword density of 3-10 per cent” ie use the same particular word three to ten times in every 100. You may also have read that it’s good usability to restrict your vocabulary online. And/or you may be asked to make sure your copy is in Plain English, which means among other things following the maxim: “You can use the same word twice in a sentence if you can’t find a better word.”

That’s web writing for you. So what if you want to vary elegantly and produce good web copy? To repeat or not to repeat?

The first point to make is that, in many people’s eyes, elegant variation is not so much a technique to emulate as a writerly vice to avoid. Certainly Henry Fowler thought so when he coined the phrase in Modern English Usage (1926):

It is the second-rate writers, those intent rather on expressing themselves prettily than on conveying their meaning clearly, & still more those whose notions of style are based on a few misleading rules of thumb, that are chiefly open to the allurements of elegant variation. [...] The fatal influence [...] is the advice given to young writers never to use the same word twice in a sentence — or within 20 lines or other limit.

One meaning of “elegant” was “fussy” or “overdone” in Fowler’s day. To vary elegantly was to be a bit of a ham. Wikipedia defines elegant variation as the “unnecessary use of synonyms” and cites the example of “elongated yellow fruit” as an elegant variation of “banana”.

In his critical writings, stylist’s stylist Martin Amis frequently presents elegant variation as an unpardonable tic of the “anti-writer”. Here is Amis on Henry James:

James’s prose suffers from an acute behavioural flaw. Students of usage have identified that habit as “elegant variation”. The phrase is intended ironically, because the elegance aspired to is really pseudo-elegance, anti-elegance. For example, “She proceeded to the left, towards the Ponte Vecchio, and stopped in front of one of the hotels which overlook that delightful structure.” I can think of another variation on the Ponte Vecchio: how about that vulgar little pronoun “it”? Similarly, “breakfast”, later in its appointed sentence, becomes “this repast”, and “tea-pot” becomes “this receptacle”; “Lord Warburton” becomes “that nobleman” (or “the master of Lockleigh”); “letters” become “epistles”; “his arms” become “these members” and so on. Apart from causing the reader to groan out loud as often as three times in a single sentence, James’s variations suggest broader deficiencies: gentility, fastidiousness, and a lack of warmth, a lack of candour and engagement.

Still not convinced? Try this, from The Art of Writing, by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch:

An undergraduate brings me an essay on Byron. In an essay on Byron, Byron is (or ought to be) mentioned many times. I expect, nay exact, that Byron shall be mentioned again and again. But my undergraduate has a blushing sense that to call Byron Byron twice on one page is indelicate… Half-way down the page he becomes “the gloomy master of Newstead”: overleaf he is reincarnated into “the meteoric darling of society”: and so proceeds through successive avatars—“this arch-rebel,” “the author of Childe Harold,” “the apostle of scorn,” “the ex-Harrovian, proud, but abnormally sensitive of his club-foot,” “the martyr of Missolonghi,” “the pageant-monger of a bleeding heart.”… The Gospel does not, like my young essayist, fear to repeat a word, if the word be good. The Gospel says, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s”—not “Render unto Caesar the things that appertain to that potentate.”

Online, especially in static web content and email, elegant variation is best avoided. It’s fine, frequently very helpful, to call something by the same name, sometimes even in the same sentence. It takes courage to do this at first, but your users will benefit.

Indeed, restricting vocabulary online is great usability. Too often, for instance, sites still refer to their target audiences by several different words – some combination of “users”, “customers”, “registered users”, “readers”, “members”, “account holders” etc – when one single, friendlier word would cover them all: “you”. Or again, it’s much better to refer to “2001” as “2001” every time it comes up, rather than “seven years ago” or “two years previously”: it saves users having to wade back through your content to do the sum.

Steve Krug, in his excellent Don’t Make Me Think, compares web users looking at pages to drivers looking at “billboards going by at 60mph”. This is no time for “elegance”; this is a time for instant clarity.