1. Someone has posted your link on Facebook or Twitter: there’s nothing like getting a personal recommendation. Plus, there’s something about seeing a link in my “stream” that makes me want to click it. I can’t help myself.2. Your site design is clean and uncluttered: I don’t care how good your content is, if I click on a link and it takes me to a site that’s busy, packed with ads, and generally unreadable, I’ll usually leave. It takes effort to read something; don’t make it harder for me to concentrate.
3. I can view your content nicely on the iPhone: I do a lot of reading on the bus. Everyday, i have two hours to kill on my commute, and I use that time to visit recommended links. The iPhone has a pretty nice browsing experience; but I’ve noticed some sites with inflexible layouts that keep fonts small, and columns wider than my small screen will allow (without side scrolling). The best option is if you can create mobile specific CSS. Oh, and if you have annoying pop-up ads take those off.
4. There’s some good non-clipart images included with the article: paragraph after paragraph of text with no eye candy looks boring. Spice things up with an image or two, especially if your article is long. Surprise me: put an image in your content that makes me go “Huh? What?” and then drives me to read the text so I can have the image explained to me.
5. It’s not too long: long articles are overwhelming. We live in an age of information overload – say what you need to say, and say it succinctly.
4 responses so far ↓
1 Alain Saffel // May 15, 2009 at 2:21 pm
Interesting post and some food for thought for webmasters.
I worry, though, that having guidelines for what content you’ll read and what content you won’t read, mainly based on appearance, will really mean you miss out on some great articles.
Not all of us are web designers, but I do agree there are certain standards to strive for.
I’m one of those people who do understand how important it is to lay out copy in an attractive, easy to read manner. I hope that all the sites I manage achieve the goal of easy readability and that the content is useful.
One thing I think you missed was about the copy itself. At the very least, your copy should be spell checked. Spelling errors, poor word usage, improper grammar and just plain poorly thought out ideas tend to frustrate me as a reader.
I respect the writer for making the attempt, but I do appreciate the effort good writers make to polish their work.
2 James S. // May 15, 2009 at 10:18 pm
Yup, I agree with these. I’ll add one more:
It’s got to be authentic. There’s a lot of recycled, flat, boring and tired content on the net. I want to be able to tell that you mean what you say, that you have a genuine opinion (even if it doesn’t agree with mine) and that there’s no ulterior motive for what you’ve written.
3 Justin Jackson // May 20, 2009 at 4:46 pm
Great comments guys. I will agree with Alain about “copy” (although I would rather get something “out” than have it stuck in editing). However, appearance is important, especially when a design distracts the reader.
Authenticity. I completely agree. It’s hard to be authentic (sometimes I want to write just to get something out there). I feel like I did a pretty good job withy my post on why Blogging is important for real estate agents.
4 Sarah // Oct 4, 2009 at 7:42 am
I agree with #5. If an article seems too long, I’ll skip it even if I’m really interested in it. I like the list format-you can scan for the important stuff or read more details if you want.
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