Style In The House

I have talked previously how we are going to use multimedia to condense our content and make sure we can output a maximum of information with a minimum of length. But this writing made little mention of our intended in-house writing style and the way this should approach the increasingly short attention spans. 

Jakob Nielsen's article How Little Do Users Read? expands on the statistics priorly referred to concerning… well….how little web users these days are actually reading of online text. According to his very-distilled figures, readers will only read 20% of text or thereabouts on pages containing the median number of 500 words.Furthermore, users are spending an average of twenty seconds at most on pages containing 200 words and very minimal 80 seconds on those containing 1000 to 1200 words. The latter bracket, (1000 - 1200) will most certainly account for the word count inhabiting each of our pages as a resource rather than short-form news site.

source:www.lifehacker.com.au

 If this situation was without remedy it would surely spell death for our web feature before we had even begun...

Alas, what we have deemed the best solution to our text problem is found in another Nielsen article, 'Content Strategy'. As he puts it best, "the very best content strategy is one that mirrors the user' mixed diet. There's no reason to limit yourself to one content type. It's possible to have short overviews for the majority of users and supplement them with in-depth coverage and white papers". 

There is a wide range of ways that web writers utilize this strategy. For us, we can achieve this concept through implementing point summaries of articles and larger form writing as on opt-in function. Additionally, larger form pieces will be broken up by sub-headings as well as click-downs to make sure those adept at skimming can do so at liberty. In other words, by (in essence) staggering our text we can retain the integrity of our information whilst appealing to both the eternally rushed and more-pensive demographics. The 'Mixed-Diet' approach is one that we figure will be integral in deciding whether our website succeeds or fails (as it is in almost every other media site)... Here's hoping. 

And with that little tidbit, we continue our research (onwards and upwards) into web-writing so as to make sure we can strike that difficult but magical balance that others have before us, those odd bedfellows, academia and accessibility!

(I will end now as I am I most probably breaking the rules I have just laid out)