How to Format Long Copy on Web Pages

A Web Copywriting Tip by Nick Usborne

 

Here’s a simple starting point: make it as easy as possible for your readers to scan, understand and read your text.

 

Perhaps the simplest choice you can make is to keep longer copy or content to a single column. In other words, keep the copy sequential in a single, vertical copy. This may sound obvious, but on many sites the core information a reader wants to find is spread across two or more columns. This just makes life harder for the reader. Keep it simple.

 

Next, make sure you keep your column width reasonably narrow. The wider the column width, the harder it is for the human eye to track from the end of one line to the beginning of the next.

 

Make sure you use plenty of subheads. This is important for visitors who want to scan a page before committing to reading it. Subheads give them an outline of what you are talking about. Your subheads should guide the reader through the key points of your “story”, and should also convey strong benefits.

 

Indent key elements in the copy. This helps add emphasis where it is needed, and break up what might otherwise seem to be a scary block of text. The longer your copy on a page, the more important it is to use subheads and indents. The last thing you want to convey is that your copy is going to be hard work to read.

 

Basically, however long the copy is, you want to convey, visually, that it’s going to be an easy, effortless read. If the page looks like “hard work”, a lot of visitors won’t even bother to read the first paragraph.

 

Formatting is essential to increasing the performance of long copy pages.

 

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