 Welcome everyone to Copywriting for the Web, today's best practices. Thank you all for joining us today. My name is Becky Wiegand, and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup, and I'm happy to be your host for today's event. You are using ReadyTalk, so before we get started I'd like to make sure everyone is comfortable chatting into us on the lower left side of your screen if you need help at any time. You can do so to ask questions or to get help with any technical issues you may experience. Most of you are here in the audio play through your computer speakers, so if at any time you are hearing an echo, you may be logged in more than once and might need to close additional instances. Or if the slides and audio don't stay in sync, we recommend dialing into the toll-free phone number at any time to get clear audio from the phone and phone line. There is an audio access code that has been shared out as well by my colleague Allie, so look in that chat window. We will keep all lines muted to get a nice clear recording for your use. You will have access to the recording and to the slides and additional materials in your follow-up email. We are, like I said, recording this, and you will be able to find it on the TechSoup website at techsoup.org slash community slash events dash webinars. That's also where you can see the list of upcoming events. This will also be added to our TechSoup Video YouTube channel, so feel free to check there for any past events. Within a few days you will get an email from me that includes all of these resources. And if you would like to tweet today, you can use the hashtag TSwebinars. For those of you that registered earlier than an hour ago, you would have received a reminder email similar to this one. And you will find downloadable files on the right side where I have this arrow pointing to. There are the PowerPoint presentation as a PDF was sent out with that as well as a couple of additional files for your use. So feel free to open that up and use those and look at those as we go along. If you get disconnected, rejoin the meeting with this green Join Meeting button. Again, my name is Becky Wiegand and I'm the Webinar Program Manager here at TechSoup. Today is my 9-year anniversary at TechSoup, so I'm happy to be with you as your host. We are joined today by Dalia Masachi who is a writer and the founder of Writing for Community Success. She is the award-winning author of the 2011 book Writing to Make a Difference, 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact. And she has more than 20 years of experience on everything from writing to the web, project management, editing, and coaching. And she's actually helped coach here and trained some of our internal writers here at TechSoup, so we're really happy to have her on. You can learn more about her work at WritingToMakeaDifference.com. And we will share out more of her info as we go along and you'll have an opportunity to sign up for her newsletter and access some of her resources throughout this webinar. I'm headquartered here in our TechSoup office as well as my colleague Ali Bazdikian who you'll see on the back end helping answer your questions. We are way over here. Tell us on the map where you are joining us from in the world today. And then we'll go ahead and get started with our topic with our expert Dalia Masachi on Copywriting for the Web. So thank you all for wishing me happy anniversary. I appreciate that. We've got folks chiming in from Baltimore, Missouri, San Francisco as well, Michigan, Illinois, Boston, Wisconsin, D.C., Atlanta, Des Moines, Florida, all over the place, Toronto. So thank you everyone for joining us. We're really glad to have you on. So with that I'd like to go ahead and have Dalia come on the line. We have some questions to kind of ask you to get an idea from our audience of participants what your level of experience is first because that also gives us an idea of kind of where to target with some of the content that Dalia will be covering today. So I'm going to open this up. And Dalia, feel free to chime in here. But how long have you been writing for the web? Go ahead and check the radio button on screen that most reflects your level of experience. And if there's something other you'd like to write, feel free to chat that into us. Give just a moment for people to respond to this one. We have about 150 people on the line with us at the moment. We'll give a few more seconds. Yes, you're coming through loud and clear. Thanks for joining us, Dalia. You're welcome. And I'm excited to be here with everyone. It sounds like we have a great group from all over. So let's work together. Yeah, and I'm going to go ahead and show the results on this one. And if you want to share any other experience or background with our audience, you're welcome to do that. But it looks like it's pretty even split really. We've got a three-way split between some brand new folks within the past few months who have been starting to write copy for the web, some who are a few years, and another 30% that are more than five. So it's a pretty clear split between our audience. Okay, yes, that's great. We'll hopefully be able to help each other and address questions from all different levels of experience. Absolutely. So here's another question we have for you. Are you involved in the decision-making about your web copy? Are you involved in actually implementing the copy changes on your website? So maybe you're the one that goes in and actually makes those edits. Are you doing both? Or maybe you don't have either of those roles, and maybe you do something else. And you're just here because you're interested in the topic. It looks like so far the great majority from what I can see on the back end are doing both. And some that are decision-makers. Kathy asked a good question right now, and I know you can't all see the chat, so we'll do our best to manage questions in the back and share out any tips that are shared from the audience with the rest of you. But she asked, will you define web copy? So Dahlia, what would you say as web copy's definition? Sure, I'm happy to do that. The word copy is really all about text. So whatever text appears on your website would be considered web copy. We also use the word content for it, web content. And usually content involves the text and the graphics or the photos. So I'm actually going to be talking about both today, but my emphasis is on the text or the writing, the copy part. That's great. And yeah, I would agree that it can be more than just text when you're talking about overall content and content planning. But yeah, the copy is what we're primarily focused on today. But let's go ahead and do this last slide. It looks like the prior poll question, it was nearly 90% of you are both decision maker and implementer of web copy changes. So that crowd is pretty unanimous or close to unanimous. And then this one is just how frequently, when was the last time you made these updates or updates to your web copy? Was it this week? Was it in the last couple of months? Or maybe it's been a few months since your site has been updated. And again, we'll give just a few more seconds for people to respond, and then we'll dive into Dalia's content. It looks like over half of you have made updates this week, which is great. And 35% or so in the last one to two months and 12% more than three or more months ago. So a little chunk that's got some content that's staying up for quite a while. So with that, I'd like to go ahead and turn it over to you, Dalia, to take it away and talk people through your background and your expertise here that you're going to share with us. Thanks so much. Okay, thank you Becky. And I'm excited that we've got people, most of you all are working on your site kind of regularly. So that's excellent. Glad to hear that. We've got some people who haven't been working on their site for a while, and that's okay. We're going to kind of hope to prod you along to get you to do a little bit more of that. And let's see, going on here to this. I think this is where we start. Yeah. Okay, so this is just a little bit about my background in addition to what Becky shared. I've been actually working in the sector for about over 20 years. And I have authored lots of different types of documents. Today we're focusing on a website. My book Writing to Make a Difference covers pretty much everything, but we're going to focus and customize it today to specifically on website copy and or content. And I've trained tons of people, thousands of people actually. So I'm happy to answer any questions. And I just wanted to kind of put that out there. There is a chat window, so feel free to ask your questions. We will hold them until the end when we're going to be doing a Q&A session. So we will hopefully get your question. And if we don't at that time, I'm happy to follow up with you and provide you some answers. Okay, there's just a little bit more about me. I don't need to bore you with that. Okay, so let's move on to the outline of what we're going to be talking about today. So first question, why is WebCon be writing so important in the first place? Why do we care about it so much? Then we're going to be looking at three keys to planning your website copy. We're going to be talking about what today's web users are about and what they're thinking about, where they're coming from. Then we're going to be looking at some specific strategies and tactics concerning usability and accessibility to improve your website. Then we'll do a little bit of an introduction to SEO, Search Engine Optimization that is people finding you via search engines on the web. Hopefully we will have some time to look at some websites including one from a client of mine that is kind of a work in progress. And then hopefully we'll be able to get to three more that were submitted by folks like you for today's webinar. And finally we'll have that Q&A session that I mentioned. Okay, so first of all, what's the big deal about web copy or web content? Why is it so important? Well, three big things here. It's going to answer the big questions that are on the minds of your audience, your users, your readers when they come to your site. They want to know first off, what is this about? What is this organization about? Can I figure it out in just a couple, two to three seconds? Because that's really all I'm going to give you of my time unless I know who you are. I also want to know who this website is for. Is it for people like me? Is it for someone else? I want to know if it's really relevant to my life. And finally, once I kind of know who the organization is and who the website is for, I need to know why should I care about what you're doing? Why should I get involved? Why should I care? Why should I spend my time on your website? So those are the big three questions and I'll kind of come back to some of those or at least those ideas throughout this presentation today. Well, actually before I go on to Plano Keys, I wanted to say a couple more things here in terms of the contents importance. Your website is not just your brochure. And sometimes people think of a website as, oh, it's an online brochure. Well, no, it's actually much more than that. It's an opportunity to engage your user or your reader in your work on many different levels, not just reading through like a brochure but to actually interact with you and be part of your work. So I encourage you to think of your website as much more than just a static kind of thing which is why I also encourage you to work on it regularly to update it, make it a living document. Folks, okay, so that's all I need to say on that. Then let's move on to planning. Okay, so I promised you three planning keys to start thinking about how am I going to put this website together or how am I going to upgrade my current website. So the first planning key is to focus on your brand. And sometimes people may or may not know what I mean by brand, so I'm just going to kind of get it all on the same page here. When I talk about brand, I'm talking about these kinds of things on this slide. What your organization stands for, what you want to be known for, and if your organization were a person, what would be your personality? What would be your identity? So if someone were to think about your organization what would spring to mind? That's all of that is part of your brand, and this is something that you need to reflect throughout your website. Let me explain. A big part of your brand is your uniqueness. That is, what makes your organization different from anything else out there? Right, so you know that web surfers are just kind of sick old sometimes, and they're just looking at a website and surfing away very quickly if they don't get what they need. And part of that is they want to know why is this website or how is this website different from any other ones? So for you, I have some suggestions that you might want to think about in terms of how you can set your organization apart, or specifically talk about it in your website. So these are just some suggestions. Perhaps you work with clients who are not being served very well, maybe in a location that is not served very well. Perhaps you have an innovative way to address a stubborn problem that is on your reader's mind, and you have kind of a new or fresh way of dealing with it, so that could set you aside as a unique organization. Maybe you're filling a gap in your community that is not filled by anyone else. Perhaps you have outstanding credentials or experience as an organization that really steps you above and beyond. So I encourage you to think about this type of thing in terms of your brand. And you may have already done that. Perhaps your organization has done a strategic planning process or a branding process. So you may already have some of these answers, which is great. If you haven't, I encourage you to think about that because that will be important as you start to plan your website and the types of content that you need to include in the site. So here's just a little opportunity for you to think for a couple of minutes here to type in, when someone hears about your organization, what's one unique fact or feeling that you want them to associate with you? I'll just give you a minute or so to type something in. We've got folks chiming in responses, compassion, enabling the future of healing, providing a safe, stable home, supporting youth, dignity, all kinds of adjectives. Alrighty. Yeah, I'm looking at the chat window here. Let's see. Great. Yeah, alright. Well, I'm seeing a lot of very, very positive phrases. And I wondered if people can make them a little bit more specific as they think about their specific issue and their specific way of dealing with it. For example, if your work focuses on forests or children or education or something like that, that's important to your work, but what sets you apart in that field of endeavor? That's the type of thing that I would encourage you to think about in terms of your uniqueness. And I see that some people are typing in things along those lines. That's excellent. Let's just take a couple more seconds on this. Okay. In addition to that, as you think about your uniqueness, I think it's important for you to think about why is your issue so crucial and compelling that it has to be addressed right now, because we know that web readers are all about right now instantly, right? They want to get their answers right now, and they want to know the most up-to-date information. So I encourage you to think about what makes your website so important that they must read it right now. Let's move on to planning key number two. So the first one is all about your brand. Think of through that how can I really focus and permit my brand. The second planning key is to really think about your specific users. Who's going to be coming to your website, and what do they need when they get there? These are just some examples of the types of people who may be visiting your website. Movies, that is, people who have no idea what you're about. They've never heard of your organization. They may or may not really understand your issue either. On the other side of the spectrum, we have very experienced folks who know a lot about it, and they're really thinking, they're looking for more in-depth information. Then we have donors. We have clients or members, volunteers. There may be some media coming to your website, colleagues and college organizations, and finally, researchers. There may be some other groups that you can identify, but this is just a list here to get you thinking about who are these people. All right, so these are just some basic things we know about web readers in general that I wanted to share with you. So the first one is we know they have short attention spans. And I mentioned briefly a few minutes ago that people give you about two or three seconds to really kind of impress them. When they come to your website, they're all about, okay, impress me, otherwise I'm going to go to another website. So I really encourage you to think about if people have shorter attention spans, how am I going to grab them and engage them quickly. Another kind of point related to that is people read slower on screen than they do on paper. So again, if we've got inpatient short attention span people, they're not going to want to read a lot on your website, at least not right away. As I mentioned before, they need to know the content is relevant to them before they read it, before they give more commitment to your website. We know people scan websites. They usually look at the first two paragraphs, the headlines, the subheads, and they're looking for bold or unusual characters, usually bold or color characters. We'll jump out off the page at them. And finally, if you're lucky, they get to the ending and kind of look for that. But usually, they're looking more towards the first one or two screens to make their assessment of whether they want to spend more time with you or not. Finally, the good thing about it is that your website is shareable. So we know that web readers will share your content if they like it, and like brochures. I encourage you to put your viewer or your reader in the spotlight. So when they are reading your website, they're coming from their point of view. So what you need to do is show them that you understand what they're going through or what they're looking for, and you're going to show them how you can help them be part of whatever solution they're seeking. So if they're seeking a solution for themselves or if they're seeking a solution for their larger community, they want to know that they can be part of that solution and that your organization can help them do that. You also want to encourage their trust in you. We all know that the Internet is full of not so great information or not so trustworthy information. So we want to make sure that the information that we impart on our website is trustworthy. Your website is also a great way to make sure that you keep them connected to you. That's kind of I mentioned that earlier. And your website also should steer them to relevant information that they're looking for. So again, I'm saying them, them, them because I want to encourage you to put them in the spotlight and finally inspire them with success. So you're sharing the success that you've had in an attempt to inspire them that they can be part of it in the future. So how do we instill that trust in organizations especially when we're kind of online and there's a lot of fake information out there. There are several ways that we can do that. One way is to talk about who's already on board with your organization. That is who endorses you, who supports you, who funds you. Do you have mentions in the press that can show, hey, we have a third party endorser here as well as excellence ratings, charity navigators, Better Business Bureau, great non-profits.org, all of these types of websites are great to help endorse you. And finally, your website should show that you are transparent about everything, that you're not holding things back or covering things up. So I encourage you to really think, get serious about this whole trust issue. So what is some information you need to gather about your potential readers? These are just a few suggestions to get you going in that direction. Think about their values. Think about what problems they're trying to solve and what goals might they have that you can help them with. And finally, especially if you're dealing with an issue that is not very well understood or is kind of under the radar, I encourage you to think about what they already know or what they don't know or what they believe about your work or what they might not believe. And that kind of goes into the category of misconception. So sometimes we have to kind of deal with those issues. And a website is a great opportunity to offer all kinds of information and ways to encourage people to see things from different perspectives. So that's another idea that I encourage you to do when you're thinking about your readers and you're gathering the information you need for focusing on their needs. Okay, so let's move on to planning number three, planning key number three. So we looked at number one, which was focus on the brand. Then number two, which was really focus on the needs of your specific readers. And then the planning key number three, the final one is to think about the benefits that you're offering as opposed to just the features. Now what do I mean by that? Let me explain it in as concisely as I can. When we talk about features, we're talking about programs, components, or characteristics of what you offer. Usually it's the services that you've got going in your organization. Okay, so if someone were to ask you what you do, you probably are going to answer with some features, but I encourage you to dig a little level deeper than that into the benefits. That is, how do those program services features improve the lives of your clients and community? How do they satisfy their needs and desires? Let's look at a few examples of what I mean by that. So benefits answer these basic questions. What does your work mean for your clients or community? What's in it for me and us? Notice in business it's all what's in it for me, but in the nonprofit sector we say what's in it for me and us, the community. And I like this middle one here. For each feature you offer, ask so what who cares? That's a really tough, sometimes that can be really tough to answer, but it's really important throughout all of your work, all of your communications work specifically on your website. So so what who cares? Let's look at some examples of what that's like. Okay, so here's an example with a homeless shelter. They have standard features that you would expect out of a homeless shelter. And then you think about the benefits, the so what who cares for the impact. And I just have listed a few of them here, higher level of nutrition and stability, higher level of employment, fewer families living in cars or on the street, the sense of being a community that cares for everyone. Those are starting to answer the questions, so what who cares? And those are key questions that people coming to your website are going to want to know the answers to. Here's another great example. I like this one from an organization called Slow Food USA. You may have heard of it. This actually comes from their mission statement. And they say in the first part what they do, their features. And then they ask the question, so what? They actually say so, and the word so can help you answer that benefit question, so that together we can ensure equity, sustainability, and pleasure in the food we eat. So this is a great example of going into that so what question. I'm just going to give you a couple minutes to think about what might be the answer to your so what question. What is the ultimate outcome result or benefit that your community gets from your program? Take a minute to think about that and type it in. Lots of interesting responses, and we know you can't read them all in the back end, but we've got examples like we provide literacy classes and tutoring so that adults in our community can gain independence, have a better quality of life, and improve their education. Every student has the opportunity to imagine, create, and realize their full potential through their lives. We create the curriculum and assessment tools so that you don't have to just read the scripts and start teaching right away. Those are just some examples that I've read from the comments coming in. There's also so often children receive an education, enough food and clothing, and a safe place to live. Lots of different types of works that are chiming in in the back end here, arts organizations, libraries, K-12, lots of community-based nonprofits, small businesses, so lots of input. Excellent. And just as I'm seeing the scroll here in the chat window, I see a lot of people are using the word so to answer the question, which is excellent. I don't want to just know what you do, but I want to know why it makes a difference, and you can use that so word to answer the so what question. So, bravo everyone. You're really moving in that direction, and I'm glad to hear that because it will be so very important to use that kind of thinking when you start working on your website. Okay, and this is just one more reminder. Whenever you talk about your programs, also list the so what who cares benefits. So that was my little very brief spiel about the three planning keys for your website. And now we're going to move into the next section, which is some specifics about how to increase your usability and accessibility for your website. So I'm just going to kind of go through rapid fire here. And again, as Becky said, you will be receiving these slides. So the first tip I have for you is go from the we to the you. And remember I said a little while ago that we want to make the user be the person in the spotlight, not the organization. So we're going to move from the we, the organization to the you, the reader. And here's an example of that. So in the original we have we want to bring native plans back to our community, but we need your help. Who's the focus of those two sentences? Obviously the organization, the we. Let's flip it around and have the focus be the reader. You can help improve our city's environment. Plant and save native plants. They bring many benefits to our community and help avoid eco trouble down the line. Okay, so the focus of those few sentences is you or the reader. And the secret here is the word you can really help you. If you start thinking in terms of you kind of having a conversation with your reader you can start thinking about how can I frame things from their point of view. Here's another great little trick when it comes to that. You can think about using the word imagine or just the concept of imagining what it would be like to be in your organization from the point of view of one of your users. Let me just give you a minute to read through this. And if you have a reaction please type it in. Well we do have some comments coming in saying it's a little long or maybe we would want to break these paragraphs into shorter chunks for easier scanning. But then also some people saying it's powerful imagery. Another person saying sounds a little bit like an advertisement. So kind of some different perspectives coming in on this. Yes, it's very interesting when I use this example with groups around the country I get a whole wide range of responses. And that kind of tells, that kind of goes to something I said earlier which is the importance of knowing who your readers are and what is of interest to them, what they want to get out of your website. So this appeals to some readers and doesn't appeal to others. And that's okay. So this is something that you might want to test or this kind of thing might be something that you would want to test on your website or test in a focus group or something like that to see how it lands with your target audience. In terms of its length it is a little bit long. You might want to chop it up into one or two sentence segments. This actually came from a website I saw called GuyDongs.com. And they apparently had found that it works well because they decided to use it on their website for quite some time. I was just encouraging you to think about this exercise of imagine thinking about how can I encourage my reader to imagine him or herself in the story of my organization. I wanted to point out this little heat map. This is from usit.com. And they've done a lot of research on this. The red and yellow areas are where users spend the most time on a website. So we're noticing obviously it's on the left hand side kind of the beginning of things, the upper left. So it's where you want to put your most critical information. So it's the first two words of a sentence or a paragraph. It's the top of the page as opposed to requiring them to scroll down to get that critical information. I just wanted to kind of impress this on you, this red and yellow area. That's where you want to get your juiciest information to your readers. Okay. Kind of along those lines, the first 56 or so words are the most important. And for those who are familiar with the inverted pyramid style of writing that is often a good idea on the web. That's when you put the conclusion first and then the supporting facts and the details later on. And that's because again, your website readers have short attention spans. They're looking at the beginning of things. They don't want to scroll down to get the juicy information. So you want to summarize your main point here with focusing on benefits. Remember not just features. So the big benefits and the big problems that you solve. And you want to tell what the page is about and why they should read it in your first few lines. That goes back to the very beginning of my presentation that people are very interested in those three questions. What are you about? Who is this for? And why should I care? Very important on the web is chunking your information. So you want to use easy-to-understand categories. You want to make sure you're using subheads as much as you can because people, again I mentioned this earlier, people are interested in reading your subheads. They may not read the text, but they want to read the subheads. Actually your subheads should provide enough information if people were just to read the subheads for them to know what you're trying to convey on that webpage. If you have a list of three or more items, I encourage you to number it or bullet it again to make it easy to scan. And if you've got a juicy quote coming out of your story to see if you can highlight that or feature it in some way on the site again because people are drawn to those kinds of things as opposed to just a block of text. Focus on your headlines. Headlines are important in newspapers, but they're super important on the web as well. It goes in terms of headlines and subheads. These are just some thoughts about headlines. And you know, I want to make sure that we get to the web review so I'm not going to read through all of these slides. I'm going to just point out some highlights. So now we're moving into the SEO or the search engine optimization section here. One big part of SEO is keywords, that is words that people will type in when they're looking for something related to your organization or your issue. I encourage you to use those keywords as much as you can throughout your site, preferably two to three times on a short page and more times than that if it's a longer page. Call them out with bold italics or links. A good resource for keyword research is Google or wordtracker.com. What is the ideal sound online? How do I want my tone to be? I want it to be conversational. And this goes back to what I said earlier that it's really about you. You're talking to you, your reader. So I'm going to start to write or think in terms of you and your. It's okay to use sentence fragments or be a little bit more casual online in tone. I encourage you to think, to sound like a savvy best friend. So you're smart, but you're not intimidating. And you're easy to understand. So if you have to choose between being clear and being clever, definitely think about being clear. Okay. If you've got blogs on your website and I highly encourage you to have a blog on your website, then the writer's voice is going to come through because your blog is probably going to be written by more than one person. And the blog gives your writers an opportunity to express themselves and use their personal point of view. So if you do have blogs I encourage you to let the writer's voice blossom. Okay. Of course websites use links a lot. And sometimes people don't use links very clearly or these are some best practices when it comes to using links. You want to send the reader to important background information instead of kind of having it all there in one massive block, right? You want to send people elsewhere to find that background information or to explain unusual terms. Links help emphasize important information. They're kind of like bold in terms of calling out things for people to follow up on or to really focus on. These are some ideas in terms of using links strategically. Include a brief description of just a few words when you're thinking about using a link. If you have a vague link like more info or click here it doesn't really give your reader a sense of what they're going to get when they click there. So I encourage you to have more informative links. For example, learn more about the latest report on climate change and then you make that phrase into the link. Another example, list of foods high in calcium. So you would have it in your sentence and then you would just make it a link as opposed to making it a more info or click your link. Calls to action or CTAs are super important when it comes to web copies. These are essentially a call to action is pretty much what it says. It's an effort to get your reader to actually engage with you in some way to take action as opposed to just reading your website. So whatever that action is that you're encouraging them to do make sure you're including all the details they need to do it. Easy ways to do it. If there's a deadline or a special offer make sure that's very clear. Remind them of the benefits, that word again, remind them of the benefits that they're going to enjoy if they do act now and encourage them to make comments. That's another great way that they can engage with you on the web. Encourage them to use the comment section below whatever website or blogs you've got. Again, it builds community and offers people a way to express themselves. I'm not going to go into these other SEO tips because we're running long time, but again you will be getting this presentation. I did want to mention just have a little plug here for editing because I think editing is super important. On the web if you don't edit your website people are going to come to it and they may find it not credible. Or problematic because it's your representative on the web. So you want to make yourself look as good as you can. I like this quote from Robert Cormier. It's a beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time unlike say a brain surgeon. Keep that in mind. Make sure that your website is promoting your organization in the most professional way possible. One great way to make sure that you're doing that is being as concise as you can. Less is more. And I gave a few ideas here about that. I made up this Vizac and I added an S here to kiss. Keep it short, simple, and scannable. Tell them how to ask right away and why. These are things that we've been talking about. Your sentences should be no more than 10 to 14 words. The 14 is kind of a long sentence especially online. You want to keep it to more like 10 words. Or fewer if you can. It's all about sound bites right? See if you can write in a way that's almost tweet-worthy. Almost like a tweet. It doesn't have to be that concise all the time. But you want to move in that direction. The first one to three screens are the most important. So you want to make sure that you're getting all of your juicy information right up there. And search engines like to have at least 250 words in on a page. So you don't want to have super short pages but you don't want to make them too long either. Just a reminder about proofreading. I'm not going to go into that right now. Graphics, super important part to compliment your text. And I like to say it's not just a cherry on top, it's actually integrated with your text. Make sure that you're using photos and other graphic elements that will enhance your text and draw your reader's eye. Draw in your reader's eye. One of the downloads that you have that's part of this presentation is what I call a swipe file. Actually not just me, but lots of people call it a swipe file. It's basically an idea generator. It's a list or a compilation of other websites that you found really interesting or that you want to stay away from, things that you don't want to do kind of reminders for yourself. So it's an internal idea factory. And I offer you a starter for a website as one of the downloads. Okay, so let's just take a look at a few websites here. And then I'll take a gander at some submissions. Change.org, I like this is just a website that you might want to look at. Notice the quick text that they have here, kind of call to action, and nice photos. Then we've got nature.org, very simple graphic here, almost no text. But the text that they use is very impactful. diva.org is another great one. Again with a short text, little snippets, and a call to action right there, LendNow or Browse All Loans. Do something. I like this one. My thing about this one is I don't know if you can read the text there under About Us, but they know their audience and they use the language that their audience would use. So that's just a heads up on that. Okay, so let's look at some submissions here. And what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to talk about what I thought was really great and what could be improved. And I encourage you to do the same as I look at them. So feel free to type in your thoughts about these websites as well. I think I want to just start with this one. Yeah, this is from a client of mine. It's a work in progress called the Washoe Meadows Community. And just a few things that I like that we are working on on this site. In their People tab right here, before they had almost no bios and they decided, oh, we want to put some bios of our folks. And I encourage them to do that. I also encourage them to have little thumbnails here with a link to their bios further down the page. I'm a huge fan of what is called internal links, these links that will jump you down. So you know what's on the page before you even read through it. Let's see on their Campaign page. I like, here's another example of it. They use these subheads and you can click down to them. Let's see on their Take Action page. They have a flyer which is a really nice kind of summation of their work. And I encourage them to use it right there at the beginning of their Take Action page to encourage people to print out the flyer and use it. Notice their navigation bar here, these links here at the top. Notice how there aren't very many of them. They kept them to a minimum and they put them in the order that they think people will probably use them. So that was another tip that they used. I like that they have a lot of pictures on their site, really nice. If you go in their photos they have a gallery and they have really nice photos here. I encourage them, they haven't done this yet, but I'd like to see some captions on those photos so we know what we're looking at. Okay, let's see. There was one other thing I wanted to just point out here. Sometimes if we don't perforate we get things like this. Here on the bottom where it says write wash-o-meadows in and then misaligned, the memo line. That's the kind of thing that you don't want to have on your site. It makes you look pretty unprofessional. So you want to make sure that you don't have that kind of problem. Okay, let's look at the People Supper. And it was submitted by Patrick. I hope Patrick is on the line here today. If you are Patrick feel free to type in whatever chat you'd like as I go through your site. I really liked this site. I liked the clean, simple design that it has. I like the brief text snippets that it uses, an example there. They have some nice calls to action. Let's see, they have a form right there asking you if you want to be part of their email updates. Then they have their social media platforms right here. They encourage people to join their dinners. This is their suppers. It's all about suppers. So they have a lot of call to actions around that. They have an about, under their about they have what, why. I really like that section. It really goes into kind of not only the features like say this is for suppers, but it goes into the benefits. And why would someone want to do this? That was really nice. In their FAQs, they are using a conversational tone. Very nice. And it's very easy to use. The one thing that I had suggestion for this site, if we click on we agree, first of all, I didn't know what we agree meant when I saw the link. So I didn't know what to expect. When I did click on it, it had three simple things that, three simple commitments. And I really liked that. I wanted to see that elsewhere on the site. And I also wanted to see, I thought the second one here, I will show up and be present. That may need a little clarification. It wasn't quite clear what you meant by that. Let's look at this other site. We also got a comment really quickly just to throw in there from a participant who said that the contrast on the menu could provide some challenges for people, particularly if you've got a community of, if your audience consists of people, which kind of frankly everyone's audience consists of people who may have vision challenges or find it hard to read color in the, or not very high contrast. So the pale blue from the menu options and then that pale gray on the white background can be a challenge to read. So keep that in mind. And that came from somebody who says former accessibility consultants. And I think the more we can make our sites accessible to everybody, the more they will be accessible to everybody, right? Excellent, excellent idea. Thank you for mentioning that. Yeah, and that kind of goes along with the whole making sure, making sure that the graphical elements of your site really pop and go along with the text. Okay. This site for Reach Out, Sherry is the one who submitted it. I like the design. I thought there were some nice testimonials on this page if you have to scroll down to get to them. But actually I think it might not be on the home page. It might be elsewhere. But I like the testimonials. I like the contact page especially. This site is a little bit slow to load. I noticed that. But when we, yeah, here we are at the contact page. So we have all kinds of contact information for all the different programs. I like that. My main challenge with this site when I came to it for the first time, I really struggled to get the answers to my three big questions. What is this site about? Who is it for? And why should I care? I really struggled with that. So I would suggest to really think about making that as clear as possible on the home page. Okay, I'm just going to come off hold because I think that we may have lost Dahlia. I think I have lost her audio too. So we'll try and get her back on if folks aren't able to hear. I know she's still showing the site but I think her line has actually cut off. So I apologize for that. She was giving some great feedback I think and input on this page. And we are actually almost at time. So I am going to wrap us up here since I think we don't have her back on the line yet. And I know she's showing another site, the Wisconsin Agricultural Education. You will get all of the slides and resources that she shared including her swipe file. So for those of you who want to look through all of the recommendations around SEO and the tips that she shared, you can feel free to do that. I'm going to stop sharing but many of you are welcome to go to the WisconsinAge.org website if you want to see what she's showing right now as well. But I'm just conscientious of the fact that she's not on the line to share those tips with us. So I'm going to stop sharing and take us back out to her presentation really quickly. So she did want to offer a special discount for people who are interested in having your website reviewed. If you are, she does this professionally for lots of organizations and helps them and regularly charges $87 for a regular review of your website. If you'd like to do that, she's offering a special discount for the first five folks to message us to say that you'd like to do that for $47. You can get your site reviewed. So feel free to shoot an email to me or chat in this chat window now if that's something you're interested in. And then I can have those passed along to you. You can also, like I said, email me at Becky at TechSoup.org and I can pass those along. So feel free to send that our way and we'll make sure that you can get an opportunity to have your site reviewed. And we wanted to just point out this is where you can find her newsletter. Feel free to sign up. We also have in our post-event survey that we'd invite you to take an opportunity to sign up for her newsletter through that as well. We would love it if you would take a moment and tell us one thing that you learned today that you find most useful. We're skipping around in the slides a bit. I think she still doesn't realize we are off the audio from her line cutting off. So I'm going to wrap us up but if you can let us know one thing that you learned during today's webinar that you're going to take back and try and implement, we would really appreciate it. Maybe it's doing that challenge to try and front load your sentences. Maybe it's taking a moment to try and rewrite your homepage content to be between 10 and 14 words long and no longer. Let us know what things that you're going to help try to do to improve your web copy today. And we would also invite you to join us for TechSoup's other trainings that are coming up including our course catalog which you can find at techsoup.course.tc. So feel free to check out the other courses available. And then starting next week we have a bunch of other webinars coming up and other events that you can find combating nonprofit burnout, managing tech and email overload, libraries as innovation hubs, community driven design, and then we'll be talking about IT staffing, who can you call when you need IT help, and how to access tech donations and resources. So with that I would like to thank you all so much for participating today and I'm sorry we lost Dahlia here at the end. I'm not sure what happened to her line but we appreciate you all being on. Feel free to look in your email. You'll get a follow up email from me later today with the full slides and recording that you can refer to at your convenience. Thank you all so much everyone and have a great day. Bye-bye.