What could be better than tea? Tea and biscuits!

My favourite person in the office is always the person who made me tea most recently (currently Mark – cheers Mark!).

A little tea or coffee break gives me a chance to step back from whatever I’m doing, and when I get back to it, I come back with a little extra energy and enthusiasm.

Whilst a caffeine-prompted energy boost might be good for my brain cells, I’m always very careful not to let it seep into my text. Enthusiasm is good, but let it show in the writing – not the formatting.

All that energy will usually make you look pushy, if not outright desperate.

So cut down on the CAPITALISATIONS and EXCLAMATION MARKS!!!!!!

Trust me, you’ll look a lot more professional if you use them sparingly – and that way they’ll stand out more and have a better chance of drawing your customer’s eye.

Once your website is up and running, please don’t neglect it. It’s horribly common for people to forget about their website when they launch a new product or campaign, or if circumstances change.

A particular client of ours has an information-based business in an industry that is constantly changing, which means regular re-writes to stay relevant.

Failing to keep your site up to date with your business or your industry can quickly make you look careless – or worse, incompetent.

Re-writes can sometimes be a struggle, you try to keep as much of the old information as you can, and slot the new stuff in, and that often leads to really simple mistakes (and believe me, I’ve made them all at one point or another!).

The most common error in a re-write is the “copy and paste” mistake. This is when you lift a new sentence or paragraph and put it into your content without checking that the words around it lead into it properly.

There are also the “tense-change”, and the “shifting persona”, where your new text uses “we” instead of “they” or vice versa, or moves into a different tense.

Make sure that someone reads to whole page of text before you publish it – and not just the new bits. That way you can make sure the new info blends seamlessly into the old content.

Councils across the country are getting their wrists slapped for using the wrong words.

Well, they aren’t exactly wrong, but if you can tell me what “goldfish bowl facilitated conversation” is then I’ll eat my hat-shaped chocolate items.

Jargon can sometimes be a really useful tool, so that people in your company or industry know exactly what they’re talking about. Sometimes jargon is just empty gibberish that could easily be replaced by normal human phrases.

Either way, the last thing you should ever do is inflict jargon on the public. At best they’ll be unimpressed, at worst they’ll be confused, and confused visitors won’t hang around on your site to find out what you mean, they’ll click back to Google and find a company that speaks plain English.

Of course, it’s harder to find yourself a new local council, so it’s easier for them to get away with it.

The beginning isn't always a very good place to start

The most useful trick to writing is learning how to order your essays. Chronological writing from introduction to conclusion usually leads you to meander through points and doesn’t focus on the important issues.

The easiest way to construct an argument, essay, experiment or website, is to split it into three stages; an introduction, an explanation, and a conclusion.

And the best place to start writing it is in the middle.

The middle is where all the meat of your arguments are, it’s where all the important details are kept. And in a website, the middle is your Services section.

All the important details a customer needs about what you provide will be on those pages, and getting them written first will force you to think hard about what your business provides and what makes it exceptional.

Once your services section is written, you’ll have a far clearer idea of what your company’s USP is, and that’s the point to move on to the introduction – your Home page.

Your home page needs to trumpet your USP, it simply needs to push your visitor to find out more and to drive them on to your services page.

The last and easiest page to write is your conclusion – you About Us page. Like any good conclusion, your About Us only needs to reiterate the USP you set out on your Home page, and backed up with evidence throughout your Services pages.

So, start with your Services, then write an introduction that builds up to them on your Home page, and then wrap it up with a concluding About Us.

Simple!

New Year’s resolutions rarely survive past January, but this year I advise you to stick with just one – this one.

Put your content on a diet.

The vast majority of websites could stand to lose a little weight. Most could stand to lose a hefty chunk. Especially when it comes to your home page.

You have only a few seconds to draw people into your site, and fat expanses of text are a big turn off.  Visitors don’t want to wade through heavy paragraphs of information. They want small snacks that provide them with the information they need.

The Home Page Text Diet

1. Bullet point each individual aspect your customers need to know: whether that’s the quality of your services, the products you sell, your location or your free delivery option.
2. Flesh out your bullet points into sentences – remember to focus them on the customer’s experience and not your own.
3. Preview the text the way it would be seen on the site (this is a LOT easier if you have a CMS!), check that the paragraphs don’t continue for too many lines. For a home page, I’d suggest 3 or 4 lines at max.
4.  Read your text to see if you’re repeating yourself, or simply trying to explain too much on the home page. Save the hefty info for your Services or About Us section.
5.  Spell check!!!
6. Get someone else to read it. 9 times out of ten they’ll spot something you didn’t. Not necessarily a mistake, but maybe a better way to phrase something, or a point you missed.
7. Spell check again (you really can’t spell check enough!).

 These 7 steps will provide you with calorie controlled to make your home page more attractive, easier to read, and will give visitors all the vital information that they need.