In today’s chaotic, A.D.D. world, people generally want to gain knowledge quickly from a website. However, those users are now creating a web development tug-of-war with search engines that smile upon lots of text.

So, what is more important – users more easily finding your site, or users more likely enjoying and frequenting your site? Both are critical to success.

BALANCE

As with most solutions, balance plays a big part. You can always make some efforts to increase very minimal content to include specific keywords and elaborate on concepts. Conversely, you can whittle large blocks of text down using more concise efforts and break up the text with sub-headers or highlighted sections.

USER EXPERIENCE

As a general rule, balance makes sense, but to build a more appropriate solution, we need to analyze our users. Here’s a few basic questions:

1) Are the users generally older or younger?
Studies are showing that the younger your users are, the less likely they will be to read large amounts of text.

2) How interested will the user be by your content?
If you are presenting information that your user will find critical to their profession or providing descriptions of a health condition that your user likely has, then great amounts of explanation may be expected and encouraged. However, if you are trying to sell a new brand of dish soap and want to list in great detail all the ways it is better than the competition, your users may grow restless.

3) How effective is the text?
No matter the subject matter, the text should be well written and to the point. If that requires a lot of text, so be it. But it will become very transparent and aggravating to your users when you repeat the same concept in three different ways in an effort to simply increase the amount of text on the web page.

4) Would you read it? Seriously, would you read it?
It’s fine to be optimistic, as long as you balance that with a whole lot of realistic.

HUMANS VS. ROBOTS

When in doubt, remember who you are writing this for in the end. You are not writing this for Google or Yahoo or MSN… you are writing this for your users - for humans. Begin with that, and adjust as necessary.