When I was a little girl, I used to watch soap operas with my great grandmother. She lived with us when I was very young and I don’t remember all that much about her, but I remember she liked to watch hockey and her soaps.

I haven’t watched a full episode of All My Children since I started my maternity leave with my first born…four years ago. Before that, I would watch it on days I was home sick from work or back when I was going to school, I’d watch it on my days off and during the summer I’d always get sucked in.

The other day I was putting in a video for my daughter, the TV happened to be on ABC and sure enough, All My Children was on. So I watched about five seconds about it. That five seconds was enough to bring me up to speed on an entire storyline.

See, soap opera writers are brilliant.

They are constantly working entire plot lines into one script for a 60 minute show…about 45 minutes when you remove commercials.

If you don’t know what I mean, just turn on a soap opera. Doesn’t matter which one, they all do the same thing – Days of our Lives, All My Children – whichever you like.

Notice how the characters say things like:

“You can’t blame me for not trusting you, Crystal. You did set the fire that supposedly killed Rachel and remember the time you beat Naomi and left her for dead when you found out she was cheating on you with Nate?”

That’s a dramatization, but throughout the script, the writers are always weaving in bits and pieces from past story lines. That way, when a fan hasn’t tuned in for a week or a year or two, they can get caught up within a half hour.

What does this have to do with writing website content?

Lots, actually.

When someone lands on your site, you have no idea if they’re there for the first time, if they’ve landed on your contact page, your services page or your home page.

You don’t know if they understand what you do or whether they’ve ever heard of you before.

Most of us make a lot of assumptions when we write our content.

We think everyone will land on our home page, then visit our about page, look at our services then contact us for more information.

But like the soap opera writer, we should make no assumptions.

• What if someone lands on your contact page and sees nothing more than your PO Box number or an interactive contact form? Do you think they’ll navigate through your site if they know nothing else about you?

• Does your contact page have your mission statement or a brief recap of the services you provide, to bring the visitor up to speed quickly on what you do?

• What if your services page is the popular landing spot for your visitors. Do you go right into a list of the services you provide there, or do you give a little overview of why your services can help people?

Go ahead and “land” on one of the pages of your website you never imagined a visitor landing on before. What do you see? If someone had never heard of you before and knew nothing else about your business than what’s on that page, would they  be compelled enough to browse your site some more, or have you lost them due to vague information that’s meaningless if they’ve deviated from the navigation pattern you assumed they’d follow?

2 Comments »