Presentation & Content Are Inseparable

By Diana Digges
First Impressions

There's a paradox in the Web universe: What's written is key, but visitors aren't coming to read - not initially, at least. They drop in, take a quick look around, and if they don't like what they see, they split.

It's visual reconnaissance, and it's ruthless.

"Lawyers focus on words. The first thing you should focus on is what your website looks like and what images you're using. The majority of people - lawyers being the exception - think graphically rather than textually," said Pruner.

So first impressions - font, white space, links, images, to name a few - count for a lot.

Web wisdom has it that a sans serif font (a more blockish typeface devoid of "hooks" attached to the main strokes) is more reader-friendly for titles, and serif fonts, such as Times Roman, are good for body copy. Just as important is the size of the font. If too small, a serif font will look "busy."

And while you can't control how your site will look to all viewers everywhere, you can look at it in different browsers and screen sizes to see examples of the range of ways in which your page will be presented. That will help you make the necessary adjustments to avoid those long lines of text that spill out of a viewer's frame. While scrolling up and down is natural behavior for a website visitor, horizontal scrolling is supremely irritating. People generally just give up.

According to usability studies, it takes longer to read something on the Web than on the printed page, and eyestrain is greater. So surround your text in white space, which provides both psychological and physical relief, the experts advise.

Navigational Features

As the term implies, such features make it easier and more inviting to move around your site. A keyword search function and navigation bar at the top of a site are de rigueur. But a particularly welcoming gesture is a site map, which links to every bit of material on the site.

"If you're not intuitively getting to where you need to go through the navigation bar at the top, site maps are a nice fallback," said Denise Howell, an IP attorney in  Los Angeles who writes frequently about Web issues for lawyers.

Links, the feature that lets visitors hop around (and that give the Web experience its quintessential non-linear quality) must be handled with care. Good links are enriching; they promise a wealth of information; they suggest expanding horizons.

But they can be overdone, and make a reader jumpy.

"There should be a reason to link. Even two or three times in a sentence isn't necessarily bad, as long as there is a reason - you're linking to something because it's important to what you're saying," said Howell. "Links to supporting material make the writing richer. It's why we put citations in briefs. It's why the reader believes what you're saying."

There is also the balancing act of offering the visitor more goodies through reasonable links, but not so many that you lose the person after a handful of clicks. For some information junkies, a network of links that spiders through an article is too tough to resist: they leap from one to the next, and before you know it, they're gone.

"Links automatically make something bold and underlined, so they draw attention to themselves," said Pruner. "By their nature, they interrupt the flow. That's not necessarily bad, if you want them to go to that page on your site that you've linked. But if you're trying to get them to read the text in its entirety, then you want to put the links on the side or the bottom of the page, or create buttons."

And because it's difficult to predict just how people will navigate, Pruner suggested repeating key articles in various areas.

Say a visitor to a firm's website is looking for an article written by one of the attorneys on changes to the no-fault insurance law. If the firm is a small one, it's unlikely to have a separate publications section mentioned in its navigational bar or site map. Instead, the visitor must go from the home page to the attorney section to a particular attorney and to that person's bio.

"That page may as well not be there, because for all practical purposes, it's not - there are too many links to get there. Very few people would think to follow that set of links. And many search engines don't index more than the home page and pages directly linked to it," said Pruner.

The solution is to put the article in numerous places: in the appropriate practice area, in an "About Us" section, in the attorney's bio.

To keep people reading, intersperse photos, along with subheads.

"People will tend to scroll down just to see all the photos and bold subheads. That's another chance to keep them there," said Pruner.

And once they've got the article they wanted, make sure it's easy to download and print. Avoid PDF files, except for forms; they're too slow.

"If you have a tightly formatted form that needs to be filled out and faxed to you, or if you're providing a government form, or if you have lots of material that's printable, but you just don't have time to code it into HTML, go ahead and use PDF. Otherwise, avoid it," advised Pruner.

Far better to make your articles available in a printer-friendly format, so the user doesn't have to print out each page.

The Writing Itself

Assuming the organizational, navigational and visual features pass muster, how can attorneys adapt the writing itself to the Web?

Rely on standard tenets of good writing: keep the sentences simple and short. Get people's attention immediately. Put the most important information at the top of the article.

"Simplify everything," said Sue Mellen, president of YourWriters.com, a Web-based content provider. "Say the most you possibly can with the least you can get away with, but be evocative. Be direct. Stay away from jargon, and build slowly to complicated issues."

Other standard writing rules include avoidance of the passive voice and using short Saxon-derived verbs rather than Latin cognates, which tend to be multi-syllabic and abstract.

"I apply the same rules of thumb I do in normal writing," said Howell. "I don't want run-on, multiple-word, clause-laden sentences. Short and clean, simple and to the point, from both the sentence and paragraph perspective. And headings are important. They're a road map for the reader. Writing for the Web is a very valuable writing tutorial because you're consciously thinking about writing short and to the point, without a lot of curlicues. Lawyers should be thinking along those lines, anyway," she added.

Some lawyers, however, just can't do it; they're too steeped in the circumlocutions of a winning brief and, in fact, fond of them.

"If you can't change your style, hire somebody who can. Get somebody else in the office to rewrite your articles or get someone from outside, if you have to. And then allow them to do their job," Pruner said.

Finally, according to Nick Usborne, an author, speaker and consultant on writing for the Web, rely on a personal voice. Because the Internet was created by those who value individualism rather than corporate types, it has retained a flavor of the personal that other media have lost, he believes.

"The language of the Web has not been determined by Madison Avenue, but by the audience. I've seen again and again how this makes a huge difference," said Usborne. "There has to be a sense that there's a person behind the website, not just a corporation throwing text at you. There has to be a human voice within the site, individual people within the organization communicating with the visitor."

Usborne points to Motley Fool, a popular online financial services company ( www.motleyfool.com ) as an excellent example of a website that has a specific, unique voice: lighthearted, but not frivolous, informative but accessible.

Even the customer service policies are written in a personal style. "'We leap at every chance to make the customer happy, so please feel free to let us know how we can serve you better' - just the choice of the word 'leap' makes a difference," Usborne pointed out. "Word choice, personal pronouns help to create voice, and the great thing about voice is that no one else can steal it. It's a wonderful way to differentiate yourself. It's really the only way. If you go to a corner store to buy eggs and milk or a vast supermarket, there are visual clues that these are two different animals. But put those two companies on the Web and almost all the differences between them disappear: they're on the same size monitor; the architecture of the home pages will be fairly similar, from a usability point of view. What differentiates them? Language," he said.

"Law firms are the same. People have to feel that a firm speaks the language they do, thinks the way they do. And then they'll come back to the website again and again."

Source: http://www.lawyersweeklyusa.com/subscriber/archives.cfm?page=/archives/usa/02/8190254.htm