As a web content writer, the best you can do is to make sure that your intro text you serves a purpose and communicates something to your visitors. While editing your content as much as possible might seem like good advice normally, intro text does have a valid role, so you shouldn’t scrap it entirely.

Below you’ll find some reasons why you need to have intro text in your content, followed by some tips for how to write it so that it makes your content more usable.

3 reasons you should use intro text

The topic of intro text is something that I work with clients on all the time. Here are 3 reasons that I give them about why they need some introduction to their content, especially when it comes to lists:

• Tell visitors what your content is about – Yes, most visitors to your website will scan through your content quickly, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to let people know what the content is about. If those scanners have any confusion about the content on the page, they’re likely to scroll back up and look for that intro text to help them.
• Bulleted lists look silly without it – Have you ever seen a section or page of web content that’s just a list of links or items? Something will feel a little off, and that’s because there’s no intro text telling you the visitor what the list is a list of, why it’s there, and how you can benefit from it. That’s what good intro text will do; it can be as simple as “The following ____ are/will ____:”.
• It’s unnatural to how we communicate – Try writing some content where you go right into the topic without any introduction to it. Or along the same lines, try explaining something to someone without giving them the context. Both are hard to do because not introducing something properly goes against the very nature of how we read, write, think, and speak.

6 tips for writing usable intro text

Now that you have heard some reasons for why you should write intro text, here are some pointers on how to write intro text that is both usable and useful to your visitors:

• Keep it short and concise – Good intro text should be no more than 1-2 sentences long and should concisely state what the page is about. If it makes sense to include keywords here, do so, but only if they make the sentence more helpful to the reader.
• Limit the jargon and fluff – Intro text isn’t the place to include marketing or technical jargon, but then again, no website is. (That’s another topic though.) And skip on the fluff as well – i.e., content that has no function and is only there for its own sake.
• Focus on the user – Strong intro text focuses on answering 2 questions that the reader has about your content: what will they find on the page, and why should they care about it. If you answer those in as straightforward a manner as possible, you’ll have done a good job.
• Precede it by a header – I’m not just talking about the intro text on a page of content here; the same principles apply to the intro text within a section of content. When writing a section header, the text of the header should be a phrase that summarizes what the intro text beneath it says.
• No more than 1 link max – Because of where intro text is on a page, a link in it is really going to get noticed a lot. If you follow some of these ways to make links more effective as you’re writing the intro text, you’ll increase the likelihood that people will follow the link contained within it.
• Experiment with formatting – Want to get people to pay attention to your intro text 100% of the time? Try experimenting with the formatting to bring more attention to it. Put certain keywords or phrases in bold print, put the whole intro in bold print, or try some alternate formatting within your CSS.

Thoughts?

To those who write web content often, what are your thoughts on including intro text in your content? Is it worth the space on the page, or should it be gotten rid of altogether? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

Visitors might not notice the impact that using the right colors can have (although they might if the colors break the mold, so to speak), but trust me when I say that they will definitely notice when the wrong ones are used.

Choosing colors for a website is more than just a matter of personal preference – the choices really do matter. There is a good deal of psychology that goes into making color choices that convey the right message about your business or organization.

I’m not saying that web designers should over-analyze their color choices. But they do need to keep in mind that this aspect of design can have a big impact on the website as a whole. Web designers want to make the right recommendations to a client because ultimately, you want to give them the best website possible.

To show you what I mean by all this, I’d like to look at the meanings that colors have, before giving you examples of what types of websites those colors are most often found on.

Warm Colors

Warm colors in their pure shades tend to have an exciting and energetic effect on the viewer. But when used alone they can over-stimulate, so they are often mixed with cool or neutral colors to balance this.

Red

Red is the color of fire and blood, and symbolizes strong and intense emotions such as war, danger, strength, power, determination, passion, desire, and love.

• Dark reds – willpower, rage, tenseness, vigor, anger, leadership, courage, yearning, malice, and wrath
• Light reds – joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, and love
• Pinks – romance, love, friendship, femininity, passivity, emotional healing, peace, calm, affection, emotional maturity, caring, and nurturing

A lot of political organizations use darker reds on their websites, while sports teams use varying shades of reds. Charitable organizations and those websites targeted towards women use pinks.

Orange

Orange is an energetic color and symbolizes emotions such as joy, sunshine, enthusiasm, fascination, happiness, creativity, determination, attraction, success, encouragement, and stimulation.

• Dark oranges – deceit and distrust
• Red-orange – desire, pleasure, domination, aggression, and thirst for action
• Bright orange – health, activity, wellness, and youth
• Light orange – relaxing, sophisticated, and calming
• Gold – prestige, illumination, wisdom, wealth, happiness, humor, meaning, attainment, concentration, and high quality

Orange is also found on a lot of sports team websites because of its energetic meanings. It’s also used on websites relating to food and nutrition, as well as those targeted towards young kids and teens. Some of its lighter shades are used on hotel, spa, and travel websites to symbolize relaxation and the calming qualities of those destinations, while gold is often used by financial and academic institutions.

Yellow

Yellow is the color of sunshine and most often symbolizes joy, happiness, intellect, and energy.

• Dark yellow – caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy
• Light yellow – intellect, freshness, and joy

Because it is the most difficult color on the eyes, yellow is only used for very specific purposes and is not a color seen frequently as a dominant color. It is often used on websites to promote children’s products and health and wellness, as well as more whimsical websites.

Cool Colors

Cool colors tend to have a calming effect on the viewer, which is why they are the most common colors found on websites. Web designers need to be careful not to overuse them, because when they’re used alone, these colors can have a cold or impersonal feel.

Green

Green is the color of nature and symbolizes growth, harmony, freshness, fertility, stability, endurance, and safety.

• Dark green – ambition, greed, jealousy, money, finance, heaviness, prestige, and masculinity
• Yellow-green – sickness, cowardice, discord, and jealousy
• Bright green - health, wellness, and excitement
• Aqua – emotional healing and protection
• Olive green – peace, military, nature

Green is often used to indicate safety when advertising drugs and medical products. And since it is directly related to nature, all of its shades can be used to promote natural or environmentally-friendly products and organizations. Dark green is found on websites related to the money and finance.

Blue

Blue is the color of the sky and sea, so it symbolizes depth, stability, trust, loyalty, wisdom, confidence, intelligence, faith, truth, heaven, tranquility, calmness, and sincerity.

• Dark blue – knowledge, power, integrity, seriousness, masculinity, and expertise
• Light blue – health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness

Blue can be used across a large variety of websites. It’s a preferred color for corporate America, so you’ll find it a lot on big company websites. The communications and web industries use medium shades of blue because it can seem high-tech, especially when combined with shades of gray. It can also be found on websites related to cleanliness (water purification filters, cleaning liquids, vodka), air and sky (airlines, airports, air conditioners), and water and sea (sea voyages, mineral water).

Lighter shades of blue are often used to promote health and wellness, travel, and relaxation, while darker shades are often used by political and patriotic organizations, legal firms, and sports teams.

Purple

Purple symbolizes royalty, power, nobility, luxury, ambition, wealth, extravagance, wisdom, dignity, independence, creativity, and mystery.

• Light purple – romance, nostalgia, and femininity
• Medium purple (violet) – meditation, creativity, concentration, quietness, beauty, inspiration, artistry, music, chivalry, excellence, ethereal, sensuality, responsibility, and sacrifice
• Dark purple – gloom, sadness, frustration, royalty, and richness

Purple is more often associated with websites geared towards women and even children’s products. Its lighter shades can be used by spas geared towards women, as well as health and wellness websites. Academic institutions will often use medium shades of purple because of its many qualities related to intellectual thought and achievement.

Neutral Colors

Neutral colors are great to mix with cool or warm colors, and are often used to tone down the more overpowering characteristics of those colors.

Gray

Grey symbolizes security, reliability, intelligence, staid, modesty, dignity, maturity, solid, conservative, practical, old age, sadness, boring, practicality, professional, sophisticated, durability, quality, quiet, conservativeness, gloominess, and sadness.

• Silver – glamorous, distinguishment, high-tech, industrial, graceful aging, intuition, dreams, communication, sleekness, and modernity

Grays and silvers are some of the most common colors used on websites because they symbolize such a broad range of emotions. They are safe colors, and when used in combination with other colors, can create a high-tech and modern look. Silver also works well when combined with gold and white to promote a feeling of control and power, so it’s not surprising that it would be used by websites that are legal or finance related.

Black

Black symbolizes many different emotions, such as protection, power, sexuality, sophistication, formality, elegance, classy, wealth, mystery, fear, evil, depth, style, modern, space, high quality, dramatic, authority, prestige, grief, reliability, classic, strength, and serious.

You’ll see black on a wide range of websites, particularly those that want to convey a sense of luxury, sophistication, and elegance – car companies and professional products, for example. Music-related websites also feature a lot of black, since it can be seen as cutting-edge and particularly attractive to a youth market.

Brown

Brown is a comforting color and symbolizes a wide range of emotions, such as friendships, earth, hearth, home, outdoors, reliability, credibility, comfort, endurance, stability, simplicity, longevity, intimacy, tranquility, masculine, nurturing, contentment, strength, passivity, fertility, generosity, practicality, and hard work.

• Beiges and Tans – sophistication and neatness
• Copper – passion, money goals, professional growth, business productivity, and career moves
• Dark browns – sophistication, richness, robustness, and nature

Brown is found on a variety of websites. Men find brown particularly appealing, so darker shades are used on websites for sophisticated and professional products. Lighter browns are often used to connote neatness and openness, while medium browns can be used on websites relating to nature, food, and agricultural products.

“Dying” It All Together

Now that you know how colors can influence the message being conveyed by a website, I hope you have a better sense that what web designers do is a much more involved process than it seems. There is a great deal of psychology that goes into designing a great website, and the color choices are just one example of that.

Because the topic of color is so broad, I’ve decided to break up my thoughts on it across multiple posts. Next up: the role that color contrast can have on website usability.

Please keep in mind that I’m not trying to brag here about anything I’ve accomplished. I’m writing this to give me a chance to reflect, but also to give people the sense that anything is possible when you work hard and put your mind to it.

That was then…

When I started Addicott Web, I had only designed very basic websites before, and it had been a few years since I had created those, so my knowledge of how to create a website using modern techniques was lacking. For the most part my experience until then had been maintaining and working with websites that other people had created.

At the time, I didn’t know whether this new business would make it or not. But I had a sense deep down that I could do this – although admittedly, my confidence at the time was still a little shaky.

Want a brief snapshot of where Addicott Web was when I first started it? I didn’t:

• Have many clients, let alone a portfolio – Back then I was still primarily known for the site maintenance work that I was doing for the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. I had only begun to talk to CityPAC about their website, who would ultimately become my first client.
• Have much of a website – Addicott Web’s first website was very basic and used mostly stock images and text that no one really read anyways. I remember spending so much time pouring through the content on it too, trying to fine-tune everything. It had almost no focus on usability or SEO, but it was better than nothing, and at least it gave me something to refer people to.
• Know what anything about blogs – Starting a blog was the furthest thing on my mind a year ago, so I definitely had no idea about how to write for blogs, how to promote your blog, or that I had a particular voice for how I wrote.
• Know how to communicate and interact with clients – I had no formal documents or processes set up for how to work with clients, and was doing everything on the fly. As an example, I was still using invoices that I typed out in Microsoft Word each month, and e-mailed from my personal Yahoo! account.

What a difference a year makes…

Initial learning curves are always steep, and mine was definitely no exception to that rule. Although I feel that I’ve learned and grown a lot as a web designer and a businessman, with only one year of business under my belt, I know that I’m only in the middle of that curve and still have a lot to learn.

It’s taken a lot of work to have come this far. I try to learn as much as I can about anything and everything related to web design and being in business for yourself from wherever I could. And it’s beginning to pay off. I’m feeling more and more accustomed to these concepts from seeing them so often – to the point where I can now talk and write about them with confidence, and in the case of how to interact with clients, actually implement them with my own clients.

Amongst everything I’ve accomplished and learned, I now have:

• A good-sized portfolio – I’ve worked on 8 different websites in 2008, which includes all the projects in my portfolio, as well as Addicott Web’s website and one other that is launching imminently. This gives me quite a selection of work to show prospective clients, and reassures them that they are hiring someone who other people have worked with successfully.
• Standardized ways to communicate with clients – I’ve created a whole range of materials to help me work with clients easier, more efficiently, and more professionally. I use Freshbooks for my invoicing, and I have web design questionnaires, letterhead, CD labels, envelopes, form letters, contracts, and much more all ready to go when I need to use it. And of course, all of them are nicely branded with the Addicott logo and contact information.
• A website that I’m proud of – I went through two intermediate designs before I finally settled on the current one. That was back in July, and since then, I’m really comfortable with it overall. I don’t foresee making major changes any time soon, other than slight usability or SEO-friendly modifications here and there.
• Started a successful blog – It took me a while to find my voice and focus in on specific topics that I could write about and provide useful information on. I’m also still learning such things as how to write a blog post, how often to write, etc., but those will always be a work in progress. I did have a few bright notes to the year – three of my blog posts got a ton of attention, which is definitely helping me to get the Addicott Web name out there even more.

Most importantly of all, over the past year I’ve finally found my sense of purpose and direction. I now know that this is my profession, and that based on how this year has gone, I can be successful at this. I’m hoping I’ll be successful enough so that I can turn Addicott Web into my full-time job, which is my long-term goal for the business.

Knowing both of those things is what continually fuels my confidence that I am offering a unique service to people. This is essential in everything that I do, from marketing to client interactions to actual design implementation.

Looking to the Future

Where do I want to be a year from now?

I want to have learned new things. I want to have written even more about the topics I do. I want to have helped even more clients make great websites for their business or organization. And most importantly, I want to look back and say that I have gone even further down this path towards making Addicott Web successful and towards being in business for myself.

I hope that you’re able to do the same things – either personally or professionally, or both – and that your 2009 is just as successful as well.

Happy new year!