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Stop Talking Twaddle

prescottIt amazes me how often I see websites with appallingly bad copy.

If you’re selling to a non-technical audience then pricing your product on gigabytes of data storage is a really bad idea. They don’t know or care how many documents they can store before they hit your 1GB freemium limit and then have to start paying.

The same applies to competitors selling online accounting software like ours.  I see so many people saying in big text on their home page that they’re a “SaaS solution” – what does that actually mean to Steve the sparky or Sarah the pie maker?

I spotted a blog post at OpenView recently that linked to  this readability calculator.

Essentially you give it a block of text and gives you an indication of the number of years of formal education that a person requires in order to easily understand the text on the first reading.

Useful for sanity checking your gobble-de-gook.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 19th, 2010 at 2:21 pm and is filed under Marketing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://www.iamtheitguy.co.uk Mark Adams

    I couldn’t agree more!! Simpler the better – dumb down everytime!!

  • http://www.mattchedit.com/Blog.aspx Matt Chatterley

    One of the big projects we have lined up is to go through every single page of our site and tune to content to make it more readable (split testing as we go).

    It’s going to be a lot of work, but you can’t deny that the better your content fits it’s target audience, the more impact it’s going to have!

  • http://www.anglotopia.net jonathanwthomas

    WebsiteGrader.com has a simple tool that tells you the reading level of your site. A blogger friend of mine espouses a philosophy he picked up from the newspaper business: always write for an 11 year old.


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