Category: Web

As mentioned in the last post, we’re going to fix one of the 5800 pages on the website. The page we’re working is on loan to us from the fine folks in charge of print management.

Before you work on any web page, you want to make sure you understand the purpose of the page. First, a quick overview of how printing works at Lane. Each student receives a certain amount of money for printing. After that money is gone, students add more money to their account if they need to print more. So the purpose of this page is to help people find printers, learn what printing costs, and to add money to their accounts.

Alright, so let’s look at the existing landing page:

Currently we’re at 357 words at a Grade 12 reading level – ouch.

You may have noticed the text in that picture was a little small (you can read the entire text here if you’d like). But there’s advantages to small text like this. You and I are highly motivated readers. After all, this is “our” page, and we’re going to pay attention to every little detail. But our actual readers aren’t motivated. In fact, they’re likely to skim in an F shaped pattern, reading as little as is reasonable. When the text is small, we’re forced to skip over the text and focus on the bigger picture (you can zoom out on any page by pressing ctrl-minus on a PC, or cmd-minus on a Mac).

What catches your eye on that page?

My eye goes straight to that huge orange button on the right hand side. That button is the Call to Action (CTA) for this page. If at all possible, you want to make sure your page always has a CTA. It doesn’t need to be a giant button like this, it could just be a link with some white space to make it stand out. This page makes a reasonable assumption that the majority of visitors are looking to recharge their print accounts.

What catches your eye next?

I don’t know about you, but I see the a variant of TitanPrint written no less than 5 times in big, huge letters.

There’s some circumstances when that’s ok, but in this case it’s unnecessary. Let’s get rid of a few. First to go? The one on top of the box in the top right corner – that button can stand by itself. Second? The orange one at the top of the page. Let’s instead replace it with with the first sentence of the first paragraph: “Welcome to printing at Lane Community College”. But let’s also get rid of “Welcome to” – using “Welcome to” on any web page usually ends up feeling superficial rather than friendly.

And that’s as far as we’re going with this post. So, to summarize:

• Know the purpose of this page
• Make sure your page has a Call to Action that meets that purpose
• Make sure to take a step back from your page and see how it looks

Next up we’ll use HemingwayApp to make some quick edits to the page text.

Welcome to the first of a series of posts on rewriting your content to be friendlier, easier to read, and easier for search engines to find.

As employees of an educational institution, we’re constantly reading and writing to our peers. I know that I spend a lot of time in Groupwise – I read 16,134 words in emails just this week – and we’re only three days in! If my emails were a final paper for a class, they’d be an A+ guaranteeing 66 pages of Times New Roman, double spaced. Of course, like many of us, I’m on a few committees as well. There’s a ton of words in minutes and papers read preparing for meetings. And all this reading isn’t lightweight – email alone averaged a 10th grade reading level – pretty good, considering the number of emails that were just “Thanks!” or “Sounds Good”, both of which are really only a step from “See Spot Run”. And I can’t be anywhere near the worst – some of you must have it a lot worse.

At work, we deal with complex topics like student retention or math completion, with lots of complex statistics and intricacies that demand exacting language. In our classrooms, we’re responsible for educating students, and part of that is helping students learn to read and write at a college level. And the content we provide in our classes reflects that.

So far, so good. But the website isn’t work communication, and it usually isn’t a teaching venue. The website is a marketing and recruiting tool that sometimes does double-duty as a repository of knowledge for students, employees, and community members. That means content needs to be findable and readily digested.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be completely rewriting a page on the website. The owner of that page has graciously volunteered to let me tear it apart and write about it here. I chose this page for two reasons: first, it accurately represents the type of writing we see all over the Lane website, and second, it’s a manageable length. There’s a few pages that are thousands of words long that desperately need help, but for a blog post, we need something we can read in one sitting.

Tools

The primary tool we’ll be using to rewrite this page is HemingwayApp, an amazing website that will provide us with instant readability feedback. Though HemingwayApp won’t tell us how to write, it will tell us some of the places we’ve gone wrong.

We’ll also look at the ToneAnalyzer, a tool that tries to figure out the emotional tone of some body of text. Generally speaking, we want a tone that’s social (but maybe a different kind of social than you’re thinking).

Finally, the web team has been preparing to roll out some integrated tools in Drupal that will help you analyze the readability and the SEO friendliness of your content. We’ll see a preview of what those will look like after we’ve finished rewriting.

Do as I say, not as I do

One of our goals in rewriting the content will be end up at a 3rd to 6th grade reading level. That might feel surprisingly low, especially at an academic institution. So why so low? Two reasons. First, a large number of people both in our target audience and across the country can’t read at a college or even high school reading level. We have a responsibility to present our content at a level where the majority of our audience can understand it.

But also because people generally don’t want to work hard when we read. Everyone knows that sitting down and reading Joyce or Proust is a great personal development exercise. But for most of us, it isn’t fun (observe the layer of dust on that shelf in my living room). The fun books, the best sellers, the ones we enjoy reading and not just having read were often written at a surprisingly low reading level. We should strive to do the same on the web.

Of course, these blog posts may fall short of that ideal. And that’s ok – this blog is meant to be educational and technical. So while it’s still important I follow the basic rules – like avoiding passive voice, providing meaningful hierarchy, and meticulously avoiding excessive use of modifiers – I’m judging my audience to be capable of handing the added difficulty and writing for them.

Sometimes that’s ok on the Lane website, too. It’s probably alright that the Graham-Leech-Bliley Procedure is at a grade 20 reading level and is more than a thousand words long. That’s appropriate for the target audience for that page. And sometimes, we’re stuck with difficult language as well. I tried really hard to make our privacy statement accessible, but ultimately it’s a legal agreement, and language choices were limited (it’s grade 10). But we have to do as best we can.

Game Plan

Next post, we’ll review the content on our sample page and the context of the site where it lives.

All the posts in this series:

• Post 2 – Finding our page and some simple improvements
• Post 3 – Simplifying the Text
• Post 4 – Hard Sentences and Tone
• Post 5 – Writing for Readability and SEO