The High Price of Bad Writing. How It May Cause Your Website to Fail

The power of effective writing for the Web has been recognized as more marketers strive to create sites reflecting higher standards of usability.

Yet, despite this good news, there's an overwhelming abundance of bad writing on the web. Convoluted prose, complex paragraphs, repeating phrases and vague navigational elements may cause visitors to abandon pages that might have the information or products they want, but which they're not willing to wade through to find.

Here's a few points to remember:

• Effective web writing... is clear, concise, descripitive. It reflects and reveals interior contents and site purpose.
• Ineffective web writing... is repetitious, complex, convoluted and wordy.
• Bad web writing... is disorganized and poorly written, to the point where visitors fail in performing basic tasks.

The irony is bad web writing may be rhetorically admirable, well informed, and possess an interesting style or personality. This comes from a distinction between pixels and printing. Whereas we're conditioned to read printed books, articles, and magazines in a linear, sometimes reflective consciousness, the web is about delivering usable data and nuggets of information that visitors are actively seeking. Usually, their quest is very specific and directed.

So, the writer's style can get in the way, even when the writing itself may work reasonably well in print (say in a book or article). Dump that article online and it looks daunting! A dense sea of text which fails to reveal its contents easily or quickly. In usability studies, visitors may navigate to right area of a site, only to find themselves defeated by a thicket of words. Sometimes the content is vague. When attempting to caraefully read through, many visitors simply don't get it, and leave the site.

You may be thinking, "this isn't true for me. Not for our site." However, you may want to recheck just to be sure. Sometimes site managers and content experts are too close to what they're doing. They don't realize the phrases, acronyms, common industry terms, or products they work with everyday, may not intuitively easy or accesssible for others. Also, attempts at clever writing, metaphor, lengthy descriptions and examples often break down on screen, as visitors lose their patience.

Great images help.

Good design helps.

The right words help.

Especially when you get to the point right away.