Letting Go of the Words

Janice Redish’s article, Letting Go of the Words; Writing Web Content that Works, is about exactly what the title suggests; writing web content that works and can be interpreted by your audience. This is MOST important when writing web content, thinking about the kind of people who you want to reach out too. If you have a specific group of people who are intended for, you must learn to understand your audience in order for the content to appeal to them.

Redish provides a list of seven small things to do in order to know and understand the audience or audiences that you are hoping to reach.

1. List your major audiences

2. Gather information about your audiences

3. List major characteristics about your audiences

4. Gather your audiences’ questions, tasks and stories

5. Use your information to create personas

6. Include your persona’s goals and tasks

7. Use your information to write scenarios for your site

After reading into each one of these suggested steps to knowing and understanding the audience, it seemed like something similar to an interview or a detailed research on your audience. The only way to reach out to them successfully when starting to write the content, is to do this research and gather as much information as possible. Once content has been started and there is a site that people (hopefully people from the audience that you are trying to reach), you will be able to gather even more information about what your particular readers will want based on their traffic on your site.

I found this diagram that I felt was another way to show how to go about finding information about the audience that you want to reach. After having done the research, the information gathered is what helps you create key phrases, emotions and other ways to really relate to the audience when they visit your site.

After reading the article, I found that the key phrases is probably what I think is one of the most important things to know and display when developing web content. Key phrases are in my opinion the most important because they are what the people relate to the fastest and they find that that”s what continuously brings them back to a site.

 

This video describes the main points of this article very well, and it’s pretty short! It just emphasizes the importance of selecting an audience or two in order to have the most successful experience possible.