"Writing Web Content That Works" Review

Chapter 2

I found that there is a lot more to a web site after reading Chapters 2 and 3 of Janice Redish's "Writing Web Content That Works". As a web site user, I don't even think about any of the factors that go into making a website but I do however know if a website isn't something that I like. As users of the internet we like to find what we are looking for at a very quick pace. Otherwise, we could waste our time searching for something in a library which would obviously take way longer than a site. Here are some notes that I took from the reading:

Successful Writers Focus on Their Audiences

• Writing successful web content doesn't start with typing words. It starts with finding out about your audiences and their needs.
• Understanding why your web users come will help you select and organize the content so that it best meets both your goals and theirs.

Seven Steps to Understanding Your Audiences

1. List your major audiences: One way to list your major audiences is to ask: "How do people identify themselves with regard to my web content? Or "what about my site visitors will help me know what content the web site needs and how to write that content?" Write for humans and nothing else.
2. Gather information about your audiences: Know your audience and their realities. Do not write from assumptions! Watching, listening to, and talking with your web users and potential users of your site are the most useful ways to find out about your audience. Think about your mission, read the emails that come through your 'Contact Us' and other feedback links, talk to marketing, talk to customer service, get people who come to the site to fill out a short questionnaire, watch and listen to people, and interview people who use or might use your website, and do some usability testing of the current content.
3. List major characteristics for each audience: List key phrases or quotes, experience/expertise, emotions, values, technology, social and cultural environments, and demographics.
4. Gather your audiences' questions, tasks, and stores: Gather lists of the questions that people expect the web site to answer, the tasks they need the web site to support, and the stories they tell about their experiences with your web site, with other web sites, and in relevant non-web situations. As you gather them, don't try to translate them! Use the users' vocabulary in your web content.
5. Use your information to create personas: A persona is an individual with a name, a picture, and specific demographic and other characteristics. It's a composite of characteristics of many real people
6. Include the persona's goals and tasks: The persona's major goals and tasks for your site are an important part of your persona description.
7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site: Scenarios are short stories that give you a good sense of the people who come to your site, what their lives are like, and what they want to do at your web site. Scenarios give life to goals and tasks in the same way that personas five life to lots of data and about your web users. Scenarios tell you the conversations people want to start. Everything on your web site should fulfill a scenario that a real user might have for coming to the web site. Scenarios can also help you write good web content.

Chapter 3

To have a successful experience on a web site, people have to find what they need, understand what they find, and act appropriately on that understanding. They have to do all that in the time and effort that they think it is worth.

Home Pages - The 10-Minute Mini-Tour

Most people read very little on the home page of a web site. They want to get what they came for and leave which typically isn't on the home page of a web site. Home pages can be content-rich, but they must not be wordy. There are five functions of home pages:

1. Identifying the site, establishing the brand: Your site's logo, name, and tag line identify it. Don't use a paragraph to explain the site. Use a short phrase that tells people how to think about the site.
2. Setting the tone and personality of the site: You set the tone for your side of the conversation by sharing the web site's personality with you site visitors. 
3. Helping people get a sense of what the site is all about: Many people coming to your site for the first time want to know: whose site this is, who these people are, what the site is all about. They want that information quickly because they also want to know how they can keep going on the question or task that brought them here. Both too little and too much can keep people from understanding what the site offers. A useful home page makes it instantly clear what the site is about and is mostly links and short descriptions.
4. Letting people start key tasks immediately: When people come to a web site to do a task, they usually want to start that task right away. If people need a form, putting the form on the home page is a good strategy. Make sure to put what a visitor might be searching for at the top of the page and also put a 'Search' at the top of a page because that's where people expect it. Don't make people fill out forms they done want. 
5. Sending each person on the right way, efficiently: There are two critical guidelines about writing links to help people get started down a good path from the home page: 1) use your site visitors' words and 2) don't make people wonder which link to click on. Site visitors are looking for the words that are in their minds so use their words NOT yours.

Discussion Questions

1. Since we use Google and other search engines to find exactly what we are looking for, are home pages really a big deal to us?
2. What are some examples of good home pages that we use today?