Media Outreach

Sitting at the computer, staring at your church website, you notice a glaring problem.  Traffic to your site is dwindling and your web pages are cluttered with paragraphs of text, overpowering your sweet new website design.

Clean content is desperately needed! Put on your cape, because today, you are the super hero.  With these simple rules, you can shape up your website to be a stellar side-kick to you and your church.

In an article by Jakob Nielsen, there are shocking statistics about the amount of text a user actually reads while visiting your site.  “On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.”  In fact, the average visit only sanctions the “user [to] read half the information” and this is only on pages with “111 words or less.”

What does this mean?   We must take action to communicate the main point, nixing the rest.  Every visitor should be engaged by your website, glean significant information and still have the desire to attend in person.

Go through your website text and follow these tips.

• Try to stay between 100-200 words per page
• Use bullet points in conjunction to paragraphs
• Guide readers to pertinent information utilizing highlighted or bolded words
• Skim text and eliminate occurrences of unnecessary words: little, rather, sort of, kind of, slightly and somewhat
• Find prepositions in the copy and remove as many as possible

The American Heritage Book of English Usage offers a great point in the battle for brevity. “Most of us are busy and impatient people. We hate to wait. Using too many words is like asking people to stand in line until you get around to the point.”

Suit up. The fight should only be as long as your paragraphs.

pic by aka Kath