There’s no content in copy

Over the past several months I have written about the importance of classifying, categorising and otherwise organising content so your users can find it. But, there is little point in doing all this great work if, when your users arrive at their destination, there is little more than a page of copy to greet them.

Yes, gone are the days of welcome pages, intro pages, landing pages and the like. Or at least they should be. And I’m not just talking about your public site, either. More than likely, this is a challenge for your intranet, as that’s the environment that has more authors doing their own thing, or because it’s internally facing is often a lesser priority than most other information-management projects.

There is absolutely no excuse in today’s web environment for having a page that is simply a pointer to other pages below, above or beside it. Your users are sufficiently sophisticated now and can use your IA, site navigation and/or your site search. Your content will be much easier to manage without intro paragraph pages and you can reduce your site size, improve your site’s usability and reduce your user’s click stream by just taking an audit of your site to determine if you have the copy bug.

Now don’t get me wrong, some copy is useful, like instructions (which could, arguably, be content) or text that’s in place to ensure your site meets accessibility guidelines. A lot, however, is simply stating the obvious and can be pared down. To determine this seems obvious, but I’ll share with you my rule of thumb: Content is content and not copy if it’s actionable in some way by the user.

This could mean:

There is a call to action within the content, like an e-mail link or something that prompts you to respond;
There is something the user can download as result of reading the content;
There is something the user can fill out;
The page contains a selection of related links not found in the navigation;
There is a demo or audio/video clip of some kind.

You get the idea. And just having site navigation on the page doesn’t count.

So many sites suffer from sales copy that convinces you to take the next step then doesn’t have the next step conveniently located anywhere near that message.

How often have you tried to find a phone number of e-mail on a site that’s related to or contextual to the content you’re reading or interacting with in some way?

And while you’re looking to weed out the copy and beef up your content, it’s important to understand how your content is authored. Most organisations I’ve worked with are still simply uploading content that is written for other mediums onto their site. While this is unavoidable with content such as technical documentation, human-resources policies, legal information or other documents that you want to be presented in a certain format, there is a difference between authoring for the web and authoring on the web.

The use of distributed authoring is almost essential now in larger organisations, and budget cuts have made it such that affording a central web team to check everything isn’t practical. If you don’t educate and train your users as to what’s copy versus what’s content, you are going to find yourself with a site full of information, but none of it optimised for the web or your users.

Writing for the web now encompasses more than just ensuring your content is actionable or broken up into ‘above the fold’ size text boxes. It is critical to your site and content’s usability and findability, both by your local site search engine and external crawlers such as Google and Yahoo! Content should be written to take into consideration how users read online, interact with content online and what click path you want them to follow before the content is authored. What is the desired goal or outcome of the content on your site? A good site should have a content strategy in place to determine this before uploading any type of document.

Alongside the content versus copy debate, there is also the issue of currency when writing for the web. Does your site’s style guide have a section on keeping content current, for example? Can your CMS set pages to auto-expire if they haven’t been changed in X number of days/months? This is a key trigger for search engines that crawl your site – the more recent the data, the higher up the listings your site or pages will appear.

And finally, I am always a fan of usability testing to ensure your content is both usable and sending the right message. The choice of the right usability company will ensure you get good test scripts written for your site and the right participants are brought in to do the testing. If you’re noticing that all the destination content is three, four or even five levels deep, it may be time to rethink your content strategy and write more effectively for your site.

As always, any comments on this topic are greatfully received. Please drop me a note at lynda@foursquaremedia.net.