If you attended one of Bob Johnson's "Writing Right for the Web" workshops last April you know that one of the key take-aways was the importance of writing clear, concise, customer-centered content. Short sentences, bullet lists, short paragraphs, and space for the eye to rest all contribute to making your content Web-friendly.

I recently discovered a feature in Word that is pretty helpful when writing for the Web. The Readability Analysis Tool is buried in your spelling preferences. Once activated the tool tracks:

• Sentences per paragraph
• Words per sentence
• Characters per word
• Passive sentences

This information alone will help keep your writing clear, succinct, and active - all keeping your content Web-friendly.

Your writing is also given Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kinkaid Grade Level scores.

The formula for the Flesch Reading Ease score evaluates average sentence length and the average number of syllables per word. Text is rated on a 100-point scale; the higher the score, the easier it is to understand. For most standard documents, experts suggest that you aim for a score of 60 to 70.

After running the tool, if I find the score on my copy is not where I want it to be for the audience, simply shortening the sentences and paragraphs, re-working text to include bullet points, and re-writing any passive sentences, will alter the score.

Here's how to access the Readability Analysis Tool in Word 2004 for the Mac. Under the Word menu, select Preferences, then select Spelling and Grammar.

Then check the box next to Check Grammar with Spelling. The option Show Readability Statistics will then be enabled, click that box as well, then click OK.

If you're using Word 2003 for Windows: On the Tools menu, select Options. Select the Spelling and Grammar tab. Again, check the box next to Check Spelling with Grammar, then check the box next to Show Readability Statistics, then click OK.

After you change these settings, you'll automatically get Readability Statistics every time you run a spell check.

If you're using a Mac, you'll also notice that you can change the Writing Style settings in this same Preferences window. The default setting is Standard but there are settings for Technical, Formal, Casual, and Custom.

In both versions of Word, you can also change the settings for other grammar options, such as checking for the last serial comma, the number of spaces between sentences, jargon, gender-specific words, and sentence-length.

On the Windows version, these settings are accessed under Settings.

 

As always, use this as a guide - the software can't do your thinking for you.

I always copy my finished content from the Web editor in the ANR Blog system or Site Builder into Word and run the spelling and grammar check from there. You never want to compose in Word and copy and paste into the editor - all of the coding that works behind the scenes in Word will make a mess of your copy in the Web editor.

 

 

 

 

Another interesting source of information about traffic on your site is in the "Referrals" area of Smarter Stats.

Again, you'll find this in the left navigation bar in Smarter Stats:

And here you'll find information about how visitors are finding you - search engine results, other Web sites, direct bookmarks.

In the clip below, I've selected "Referring Sites" for the ANR Catalog site:

The default time period is for the past 7 days, but you can use the calendar to select any time period you like.

Each of these listings is a live link. The link takes you to the home page of the referring site, not the actual referring link - that's a different report.

For example, the Dave Wilson Nursery site has made 33 referrals in the past week to the ANR Catalog. Just knowing the referring site can be helpful enough - you don't always have to track down the referring page. But if I want to know the exact link I have to do a little detective work. A few minutes of clicking reveals. . .

a very nice reference to The Home Orchard.

But you can also look at "Referring Links" which gives you more (sometimes too much) detail.

From this report, I can see that most of my referring links are internal links from ANR Web sites. But the direct link from the Dave Wilson site is also there, at number 28.

So how do you use this information?

First, it's a good idea to have a handle on referring sites. It can reveal some pleasant surprises (as in the above example). It can also give you an idea of how well you're doing in search engine returns.

In this example, I see that a bookmark or direct entry is still my number one referral. For several weeks after we made the changes to the online catalog, Google was the number one referrer. Now Google has dropped to #2. This tells me that if I want to increase search engine traffic, I need to make some changes to ANR Catalog. If the search engine crawlers find static copy at your Web site, it can drop in the rankings.

Second, this is a good place to take some baseline statistics before making changes to your website. After the changes are implemented, you can see if changes to your content or title tags have had any effect.

 

 

 

 

Perhaps you've noticed that the Tip of the Week has gotten a little erratic - sometimes in spite of my best intentions, the weekly posting gets delayed.

Even if web communications is part of your job description, we're all pressed for time. I heard a lot of feedback at the Writing Right for the Web workshops that went along the lines of "This is great information, but where do I find the time?"

How do you set priorities?

One way is by looking at statistics. We use an analytical tool called Smarter Stats for Division web sites. If you're not signed up for Smarter Stats, just e-mail Dave Krause, and he can enable Smarter Stats on your Site Builder dashboard.

Traffic and click-through's can help you establish priorities. If a page on your Web site isn't getting any traffic you can make it a lower priority, or try to determine why it's not getting any hits.

If you want to increase traffic to the page, look at the Customer Carewords survey results. Are Carewords prominent on that page? Remember, you have about 10 seconds to capture a viewer's attention before they move on. 10 seconds!

Equally important to the number of hits, is "How long did they stay?" A visit of less than 10 seconds means the viewer didn't find what they're looking for.

How do you find this information in Smarter Stats? In Smarter Stats, go to the Visitors folder under Report Items in the navigation bar on the left. Under Visitors, you can choose from a few reports that show length of visit -- Monthly Visit Length, Daily Visit Length, and Weekday Visit Length.

You can also choose a date range by using the calendar at the right. The report shows the average visit length in seconds.

 

Other tools are out there - I've heard good things about Google analytics, but I haven't used the program.

Remember, Smarter Stats doesn't give you hard data there are too many variabiles.  But you can use it as a snapshot and a guide to what's going on in your site.

I'll talk about other helpful information found in Smarter Stats in the next post.

In my marketing workshops I spend a good bit of time talking about the importance of color in reinforcing brand awareness.

There are some good corporate examples. Most people associate Coca-Cola with the color red; and UPS has built an entire marketing campaign around their corporate color - brown.

One of the things we know about the ANR brand is that to many, Cooperative Extension is the face of the University of California in their community. Another brand attribute is the role of ANR as the bridge between local issues and research on the UC campuses.

From the Carewords survey, we also know that our clients place a high level of confidence in the reliability of our information because it is based in scientific research. To our clients, the connection to the parent brand - the University of California - is quite strong.

I recommend as a best practice the use one of the blue andgold color schemes available in Site Builder to visually reinforce the connection to the parent brand.

I have heard that some are reluctant to use the blue and gold color scheme because of fears of color fatigue. They think that choosing an alternate color scheme makes their Web site stand out in a sea of blue and gold.

I would assert that the benefit to using blue and gold outweighs any perceived downside. Visitors to your Web site rely on visual landmarks like color as navigational tools, so color plays an important role on many levels on your site.

But in answer to the visual fatigue issue - once again, design comes to the rescue.

We now have 3 blue and gold color schemes available in Site Builder!

The original UC Blue n' Gold

 

Goldfingers Cerulean-nose

and Hula Ba Blue which features a saucy touch of burgundy

You can change your color scheme with the click of a mouse from your Site Builder dashboard

 

 

Hats off to Alex Zangeneh-Azam for the new color schemes!