EERE Communication Standards Blog

Reading and the Web: Why Text Needs to be Easy to Scan

One of the things you'll find emphasized again and again in the EERE Content Standards is that your content should be short and broken up so people can easily scan it. No matter what type of page you're writing, home pages, landing pages, and content pages all require short, descriptive, easy-to-scan text. And all throughout the guidelines for Page Elements are reminders that text on the Web must be broken up into easy-to-digest pieces.

To further drive home the point, see this story from Slate.com, Lazy Eyes: How We Read Online. It shows, in a very tongue-in-cheek way, how important it is to break up your text into short paragraphs and how you can use white space, bullets, and links to your advantage.

This is one of the reasons why the EERE Content QA Checklist comes in handy when writing for EERE sites—many of the steps remind you to check the length of your headers, intro text, and content on all of your pages. Using the checklist when you write can help ensure that your content is easy to read and understand.

Designing Your Home Page

How do you maintain your site's home page? Do you have a clear plan about what will be posted on your home page—and what won't?

The space on a home page is both extremely valuable and often overused, and without a clear plan about what belongs there it can become cluttered and impossible to navigate. So it's probably not surprising that you often hear that your page should have as few links as possible and should instead zone in on the core tasks your users have.

Thinking about Your Users' Top Tasks

What do people come to your site to do?

Now that you've thought a little about who your top audiences are, it's time to figure out what those readers want to do. What do they want to find on your site? What do they want to do?

Very few people come to a dense and information-heavy site like EERE just to browse. They come here because they want to do something—to find information about a certain topic, to solve a problem, or to conduct business. Without identifying what people most commonly come to your site to do—their "top tasks"—a site can become cluttered and unfocused.