// Good Content Comes in Small Packages – Enervision Media

You’ve just written a beautiful paragraph on your Web site describing your latest product. It’s grammatically sound and elegantly worded, it’s clever and flows beautifully, and you’ve introduced it with a succinct, eye-catching headline sure to both inform and entertain your users. But that’s not enough. Unfortunately, many Web developers, designers, and content creators overlook some of the most important components when building or augmenting their sites: small-form content, like links, buttons, drop-downs, teasers, short headers, and automated tool instructions must also be crafted with the same care and intent as your long-form narratives.

Click here! Clearly guiding and directing your users is key to making your site usable and useful. While most of us know now that using “click here” for a hyperlink is a big no-no, we still haven’t grasped the importance of using the same concise language in our links as in our long-form descriptions. As my high school English teacher always said, writing less and making it mean more is much, much harder than producing a 30-page research paper. But if you want your users to explore your site, it’s crucial to provide them with interesting, trustworthy guideposts. Your links should be an invitation to your users, but be careful about setting them up for disappointment: you don’t want to oversell the journey or they will lose faith in you.

Links and navigation items need to be clear and definitive – where are your users going when they click that link? What are they going to see? What can they expect? While exploring a Web site can be a bit of a treasure hunt or a quest, you should leave the enigmatic links to the video game developers. Tell your users what to expect in simple declarative words: “Features and Specifications” or “Meet Our Staff;” not a generic “learn more” and never the nebulous “click here.”

Read more! Short form headers and “read more” teasers that accompany press releases or feature stories should give your users a preview of what to expect. They should be clever and enticing, but also add to the understanding of the material that lies ahead. Think of these components as trailers to the featured presentation: they should make your users want to see the entire movie.

Fill out for more information! Automated tools and applications are wonderful things. They simultaneously send customized information to your users while gathering their data for you to use. Automated tools are a collaboration between front-end and back-end Web professionals, with IT staff building the functional components and marketing or communications staff designing interfaces and producing copy. Unfortunately, in too many instances, these tools are created under intense deadline pressure and then tossed up on a site without a review of the content that accompanies the forms and fields. Lost in a sea of poorly-written (or even entirely missing) instructions, users abandon these forms in frustration, leaving your Web site behind and taking their demographic data with them.

Take care of your bones. Your doctor advises you to keep your bones strong to ensure your overall health. Think of these short-form content components as the skeleton of your Web site. If they are strong and healthy, they readily support the flesh of your long-form narratives, like product and service descriptions, biographies, press releases, case studies, and other Web communication products. But when neglected, they can weaken your message and compromise your site’s overall health and productivity.

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