1. If you have sections designed for a specific group of people, write ‘For’ in front of that section. Eg don’t write:

Flu information centre

• General public
• Journalists
• Healthcare professionals

Write instead:

Flu information centre

• For the general public
• For journalists
• For healthcare professionals

2. Sometimes, more – not less – is more. People don’t mind scrolling that are 2/3 full screens long if they are confident, from the information they’ve seen, what they want is there. Scrolling is easier for people than clicking

3. ‘Back to top’ links are overused – people know they just have to scroll to get back to the top.

4. People don’t change the zoom level when reading a PDF. They will just struggle to read the PDF at whatever level of magnification it opens at. A good reason to convert important information on PDFs into web pages

5. Always stick to convention when labelling as people are used to scanning for familiar terms. About us pages should always be About us or About <company name>. Not Our company or Team Acme Solutions or Meet the Guys!. And always write the official company name on the About us page – this is where journalists always look for (and often struggle to find) it.

6. Writing for younger audiences means writing for the web techniques are even more important.  Young people often have laptops not desktops, which often means no mouse or printer, poor internet connections, poor sound, a smaller screen and sitting less comfortably when accessing content.

This summer, the Media Trust is working with Sticky Content to give charities the chance to win free web-writing consultancy. Runners up will receive a free place on one of the Media Trust’s training workshops.

If you think expert input could make a difference to your digital content – and, above all, the people you exist to help – enter now by making the case for your project

Any charity can apply – just explain what you need and how we at Sticky Content could help you make a difference.

What’s on offer
For your project, you could choose to ask for help with:

Writing and editing…

• content for your website
• marketing emails and newsletters
• words around your online forms

Advice…

• finding the key issues with your copy
• building a tone of voice for your charity
• planning your publishing schedule

Training…

• how to write for the web
• how to write emails

Are you eligible?
You can apply to win the free project if…

• you’re a registered charity
• you need help with your website content (not the design or the programming – just the words)
• you’ve got a way to measure the results (email opens, newsletter sign-ups, donations etc)

You also need to be happy for Media Trust and Sticky Content to:

• use you as a case study
• do the work at a convenient time

Apply now
Make the case for your project

Just give a few details to apply for free expert help with your web content – it takes around 10 minutes.

Here’s a useful summary of ways to make sure your email content is usable:

1. Subject lines should be treated like headlines – clear and upfront, not vague eg Sticky Content June news.

2. Always remember the people who have images turned off! Along with your subject line, people use the “Can’t read this email?” line to decide whether to open the email, so don’t fill yours with duff copy.

3. 20% of people don’t get through the subscription process, so the copy around this needs to be good. Avoid double negatives eg “If you don’t want to get emails from advertisers, don’t tick this box” and clunky phrases like  “Denotes mandatory field”. (Also, lots of people failed the subscription process when they had to click on a link in an email to confirm registration – they thought the email was just a “thank you for registering” email so didn’t bother to click the link. If you’re going to use this sort of email, the copy needs to be instructional from the subject line – no “thank you”, “welcome” or “congratulations” until the process is complete!)

4. Always use the phrase “unsubscribe” or similar, not “Manage your preferences” etc.

5. When people are looking for a particular message in their inbox, they look at Sender first. When they’re looking for an item of interest, they look at subject line.

6. Don’t use a real name for the Sender if it’s not anyone well-known (Jakob Nielsen is ok, Claire Bussey is not!). You can use a real name within the copy if it adds something eg animal charity PDSA send some emails from named vets

7. Don’t repeat the Sender name in the subject line: it’s a waste. We should ask clients what Sender name they’re using when we write their subject lines.

8. Don’t force people to click through to landing pages. Give them useful snippets of info in the email with the option to read more – don’t tease the

9. Why scannability matters in email:

• the average person spends less than 1.10 minutes reading an email newsletter
• only 19% of people read the whole newsletter
• most people skip around the content so make it clear where each item begins/ends
• users like recognisable patterns/formats

See also my blog about the use of names in generic emails – the gist is that it’s ok to use names if the email is personalised or customised and/or if you have a relationship with the subscriber (eg they’ve bought something).

Being the ‘content person’ in an organisation can be a lonely experience. Every day we speak to people who feel their digital copywriting skills are under-developed or undervalued and who come to us for training and advice.

So we’re launching a Mentoring Programme to bring these people together and deliver ongoing training and support in our specialised field. Joining the Sticky Content Mentoring Programme gives you:

• training from the industry’s leading digital copywriters
• the opportunity to share your experiences with peers in other industries
• ongoing support and the chance to have your work constructively critiqued by experts

Why Sticky Content as mentors?
We know that plenty of people offer copywriting training. What makes us special is that our trainers don’t just train in digital copywriting, they’ve been writing digital content every day since 1997. So we know exactly what you’re going through, the battles you have to fight and how to make a business case for investing more time and budget in copy.

What will the Sticky Content Mentoring Programme involve?
The Sticky Content Mentoring Programme runs twice yearly, in October and January, starting October 2010. As part of the programme you’ll come in for a morning each month and get:

• training on an aspect of digital copywriting and best practice
• the chance to discuss any current copy issues you have in a confidential environment
• feedback on your work from copywriting experts

In addition as a Sticky Content mentee you benefit from:

• auditing and performance benchmarking for 6 pieces of your own content to help you monitor your improvement
• networking opportunities with peers in similar roles in different organisations
• discounts on Sticky Content open courses for yourself and other people in your organisation
• access to a dedicated online forum for support and mentoring

Want to find out more?

Book your place now at one of our free, informal Mentorship Breakfast Briefings – July 21 or August 18.  

Can’t make it on either of those dates? Email us and we’ll arrange a time to suit you.

When bold text is done badly it can just frustrate the user and, from a business perspective, lose their interest before you’ve had a chance to get your message across.

Eye-tracking studies have proved scanning for bold text is ingrained into online behaviour. Users know that if your web page is difficult to scan they can find 10 more pages out there that require less brain power to ‘read’ – and they won’t hesitate to go in search of them instead.

After the headline and standfirst, users tend to scan for bold when faced with the prospect of reading a long article online, to choose whether or not to spend precious time there.

In practice, this means that your reader should be able to scan only the bold text on a page to get a clear idea of what’s going on. This means you should choose self-contained, meaningful phrases to emphasise.

With this test in mind we came across a particularly bad use of bold text on the BBC, a site that’s normally very good at online presentation. In this instance users are unlikely to be any the wiser as to what the article is trying to say when they scan these phrases:

• Plastic bags really
• Using electric hand
• At a mere
• New Zealand apples
• Watching TV turns
• A typical book
• Drinking a fine
• Getting cremated is
• A year off
• Keeping your old

What would work better is highlighting each “environmental nasty”, not the first 3 words of each paragraph. The user could then choose whether they’re interested in that topic and read on. Even better than that would be to emphasise a short, self-contained phrase that gives the reader a useful bit of information to take away, even if they choose not to read anything else on the page.

The first example of bold in this article is the closest this web page gets to getting it right, but it should have stopped at ‘Plastic bags’.

The second point should at least have ‘electric hand driers’ highlighted. Personally, I’d bold “electric hand driers beat reusable towels”. This line stands alone, tells the user something useful and they don’t need to read the rest of the paragraph to understand it – but they can choose to if they want to know more.

I’d reword the third paragraph  slightly and highlight “milk doubles the footprint of a cup of tea”. Again, this phrase can stand alone and the reader doesn’t have to read the rest of the paragraph to feel like they’ve learnt something.

Incidentally, the headline fails the online user too. “A bad reputation”tells the reader nothing about the article that follows, meaning the user is forced to read further to gain an understanding of the article – or they might just give up and search elsewhere for the information they’re looking for, of course.

Have you seen any really good or bad examples of bold online? Share them with us.

In our experience, apart from product managers, no one ever complains that things are being made too simple. However, you could argue that jargon has a function other than to obscure the facts or make people feel that what they do is very important.

Jargon makes people feel they belong. When they discover a choice phrase like “sum insured” they think they’re in the right place. But while they may believe the presence of jargon means the writer has an in-depth understanding of their industry, the opposite is likely to be true. It’s easy to hide behind jargon when you haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.

However, sometimes there is a difference between jargon and specialised language – words for things that are only used in a very specific context. Where would we be without our H1s, standfirsts, CTAs, break-out quotes and anchor text, for example? Is our jargon OK while no-one else’s is? Answers in the designated online communications area below, please.

To find the language rules that help subject lines succeed, you need a huge sample. But most organisations can’t test more than a handful of subject lines at a time. This is where email agency Alchemy Worx comes in.

Instead of split-testing subject lines for a single email or organisation, they plan to analyse their back catalogue of thousands of A/B tests, all at once – plus test results contributed by other agencies and organisations (and perhaps some from you…).

The largest collaborative subject line study ever run

The study, to be produced in association with Sticky Content, will analyse the language, construction and grammar of thousands of A/B tested subject lines to come up with the winning formula for wording a successful subject line. We’ll be hoping to answer such questions as:

• Which work better in subject lines – questions or instructions?
• What are the most effective words to use in subject lines – and what are the words to avoid?
• Does mentioning your brand name in a subject line really make a difference?
• Does personalisation in a subject line improve performance?

It will involve thousands of pairs of subject lines from all industries, and identify universal trends. The results will be published in a report giving the techniques that make subject lines successful.

How to get involved

Have you run A/B subject line tests in the last 18 months? You can get a free advance copy of the report by contributing your data to the Alchemy Worx study. Send in your data by 9 July 2010.

Get involved in the subject line study

One issue that crops up time and again is how long-winded FAQs often are. If an FAQ is a closed question — ie if it requires a yes or no answer, like “Can I return a CD if I’ve broken the seal on the wrapping?” — the most useful, usable thing you can do is answer the question directly at the very start of the answer: eg “Sorry – no. Our policy is to…” or “Yes, so long as you still have the receipt” or even “That depends on the condition of the product inside.”

The rest of the answer will go on to elaborate on this answer, but for many this instant summary will just be enough.

If that sounds obvious, you’d be surprised how many FAQs go round the houses in their answer before actually getting to the “yes”, “no” or “maybe”. (Note we’re not saying that you should over-simplify your answers, only that you should give a clear idea at the outset of the FAQ what the answer actually is.) It’s as if the author is worried that the user won’t be able to cope with the truth, so they’ve got to sit them down and make them a cup of tea first.

Here’s an example of the sort of thing we mean:

I have opened my CD. Can I still return it?

The company’s sales policies state that items are only resaleable when they are enclosed in the original packaging.

The removal of a CD’s plastic wrapping is considered as breaking the packaging, rendering the CD unresaleable.

Because of this, the company is unable to accept returned CDs where the packaging has been broken.

The one exception to this is if the CD was faulty, and returned faulty CDs can still be accepted even where the packaging has been broken. Returned CDs should be sent to the usual returns address.

Off the top of my head, there’s [Go], [Submit], [OK], [Continue], [Confirm], [Proceed], [Select]. But which of these is the most usable, effective option?

[Submit] is problematic for me because it’s not plain English and it implies that you are sending something to someone (such as an error report), when in fact you are only sending an instruction to the website. [Continue] and [Proceed] could be confusing if you’re not in the middle of a multi-step process. [Select] could similarly be ambiguous if it leads me to think I must choose between options I can’t see.

So what works best? I put this question to Jakob Nielsen at London Usability Week 2010. His answer is that [OK] is a good fallback, but can also be problematic too: what actually are you saying OK to? In his view, a button name will be as specific a label as possible of the task at hand. He gave [Add to cart] as a perfect example of this, while also warning that brevity is crucial.

So we can see that [Download], [Apply now] and [Buy now] might be usefully descriptive, while [Upload your details to the website] might raise other issues…

Again and again we saw readers visit a page and read headings and links, headings and links – sometimes giving a page 2 or 3 scans and looking at nothing but these navigational elements before focusing on a particular area and choosing to read the text.

We’ve been teaching people about scan-reading for years, but it can be easy to assume that it’s a question of emphasis – that people focus slightly more on headings than they do in print, or that links are useful aids for page navigation.

In fact, scan-reading is the only game in town. If you still think meaningful headings and link text, short paragraphs and clear calls to action are optional extras – or you need to convince someone who does – you could do worse than spend some time with the clips below…

John Lewis clothing product pages, from Simple Usability:

Search results page, from Google:

Apple product demo pages, from Visiontrack Research:

News pages, from the Poynter Institute

Read more about eyetracking in Nielsen Norman Group’s book on the subject, Eyetracking Web Usability.