To make a great visitor experience on your website, remember this; your website is not for you. It is in the sense that it represents you and that it is meant to draw visitors to your business or cause, but the content itself should be made with your visitors in mind.

Who is the (target) audience?

To serve a website, you need an audience to serve it to. Many who are new to websites end up with a kind of personal archive. Do a little bit of research into your topic or business and find out who is most likely to be interested in what you offer. If you are selling water bottles, then your audience likely includes physically active individuals or those taking part in sports.

What are they looking for?

Create content that will be interesting or relevant to your audience. If your audience consists of sports fans, they may be interested in teams that are currently playing. Do not shy away from descriptiveness; if you are a sports fan and your audience are sports fans, then it is safe to assume that they understand sports related concepts and lingo.

Why are they looking for it?

If content is king, then context is queen. Going hand-in-hand with the previous point, make sure that you understand why someone may be looking for the content found on your website. In the case of selling water bottles; look into some of the search terms that visitors may be using. Are they looking for gifts for their sporty friend? Are they looking for team specific bottles to take to the upcoming game? Use this knowledge to create a website and content that is useful to your visitors.

Now that you have a better understanding of your audience and what they are looking for, you can begin to design and write your website to draw visitors to your site. Keep in mind that the more visitors must navigate to find what they need, the more likely they are to leave before doing so. Only include relevant pages with necessary information.

Are you looking to start up your first website? Do you need help writing content? Contact us to find out more about our website and content services!

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If you want the information to be as accessible as possible, you’ll have to dial down the Greek, and think like an educator.

Sometimes, the simplest solution is also the best solution; use fourth grade writing. If you find yourself opening a new tab and searching “fourth grade writing prompts”, then allow this guide to save you the trouble with three, simple tips!

Guide To Writing for Any Reading Level

1. Understand Your Audience

Who are you writing for? It might make sense to use complicated language when writing a physics report to your peers, but your followers on social media are going to have a harder time grasping the material.

2. Put The Thesaurus Away

For some, this is a habit from the early years of grade school, when learning to use different words to avoid repetition. For others, it’s simply too tempting to show the reader an impressive vocabulary. Casually including “antidisestablishmentarianism” in your content might feel good, but it’s also a dyslexic’s nightmare (and you probably had to re-read it a few times or skipped over it entirely).

Don’t be afraid of repeating the same word a few times, if it means your content is easier to understand.

3. Utilize Common Knowledge

What constitutes as ‘common’ knowledge is sometimes up for debate, but if a fourth-grade student can grasp the general idea, then you’re on the right track.

This isn’t limited to topics either; you can use commonly understood concepts to bridge the gap of understanding between basic and complex. For example; “search engine optimization” can be described as making it easier for users to find your website when they search for something online.

In a word; simplify.

Everyone likes to feel intelligent, and nobody likes to feel unintelligent. Write so that your audience can understand in a way that won’t alienate them. This is especially important in the realm of marketing when you want to convince your audience to take some sort of action.

It might be helpful to think of it like this; you are writing a cookbook, and your audience is in the fourth grade. You can’t list to a fourth-grade student the ingredients to make a New York cheesecake and expect them to understand what they need to do. At the same time, too much detail and technical language will confuse them. You need to take them step by step, using basic language, and explaining each step as it comes up.

For users, your content should feel like a learning experience, not a frustrating one. If they can already get something out of just reading your content, they’ll feel more inclined to follow up on your call-to-action.

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