Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. One of the key differences is that, when people use the Web, they are relentlessly task-focused. They want to do something, and they want to do it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Most legal consumers become annoyed when they clicks on a search result that turns out to be irrelevant. It is the now, the moment, that matters. And every moment that is wasted by clicking on an irrelevant result leads to frustration.
The Web is the land of attention deficit syndrome. You must deal with the content-attention paradox: you have so much to publish, yet people have so little attention to give. Attention is like an elastic band: it will stretch so much and then it will snap. People’s eyes dart across pages, scanning impatiently. What’s the most popular button on the browser? The “Back” button. To paraphrase Arnold Schwarzenegger, if you lose the attention of your reader because your page is badly organized and/or you’ve got filler content, they hit the back button, muttering: “I won’t be back.”
The vast majority of people come to your website to do something specific, and they want to get in and out as quickly as possible. Identifying the most important tasks that people come to your website to complete, and helping them do so as quickly and efficiently as possible, will be critical to the success of your website.
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