Making a Good First Impression

A website or application is like a restaurant kitchen that is visible to its diners.  If the kitchen and its staff aren’t clean and kept that way, it won’t matter how good the food is; people won’t eat there.

Nothing turns a site user off more than paragraphs of text, misspelled words, and poor grammar.  These are all signs that the people running the place don’t really care about you and your experience.  They are just trying to fulfill orders and collect money from customers.

While the consequences of not having time to clean equipment in a kitchen are obviously more dire than misspelled words and poor grammar on a website, the result is similar; your customers won’t trust you to do complex things if you can’t do the basic ones.

Here is a quick list to ensure that your site text is ready for guests:

• Spell check…spell check….spell check.  Did I mention spell check?
  This seems like a no brainer, but it is so simple that it’s often overlooked.
• Get rid of unnecessary words, like Please and Simply.
  Pretend that you are paying per word or tweeting. 
• Try to avoid words or phrases which reference location, like “in the fields below”, “on the form below”.  Explanatory text should be visually grouped with the stuff it references.
• Avoid acronyms, abbreviations, and contractions.
• Think about where sentences or lines of text break and what that does to readability.  If a few words are forced to a second line of text, think about rewriting to keep everything on one line.

Doing these things won’t instantly make your site the best in the land, but your users will stick around long enough to let your site be judged on its own merit.


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