Nora Brown Design

Streamline Your Content

Steve Krug (web usability expert and author of Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition), posits this “Third Law of Usability”:

Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.

In support of this law, he quotes from E.B. White’s The Elements of Style, saying that “Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should have no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences.”

This is doubly true on the web, where attention spans are short, and people tend to flit from one page to another, or one website to another. Furthermore, it can be applied on a more macro scale: A website should have no unnecessary pages. In a recent article by Gerry McGovern (a web content expert), entitled Removing poor quality content increases customer satisfaction, he describes Microsoft’s efforts to weed out unnecessary and unhelpful pages. The benefits Steve Krug lists for trimming words and sentences also applies to trimming entire pages:

• It reduces the “noise level” of the site; makes it less busy
• It makes the useful content more prominent
• It makes the site more compact, allowing the user to explore more of it

What to do

I recommend taking a top-down approach. You should trim, in this order:

1. Unnecessary pages
2. Unnecessary paragraphs
3. Unnecessary sentences
4. Unnecessary words

For the pages, over time you will have some facts to guide you: check out your stats and look for pages that no one or very few people have ever visited. Either those pages are not useful to visitors of your site, or are not as accessible as they should be.

Trimming paragraphs, sentences, and words may be much harder, especially if you have written the content yourself. I highly recommend having a friend, colleague, or professional copy editor (or your friendly web designer) read your content and make recommendations for where you can cut down.