Hackpacker

Finding the right weight for your content is a balancing act. Image via pixabay . Recently, I've been working with a university who has a lot of very complex information on their website. Their content has to simultaneously speak to a range of audiences including students, prospective students, current staff and more. The problem of many audiences often makes for long pages that are hard to decipher. So how do you keep that content clear for everyone without making content too complicated? 1. Pick the perfect page length. Lots of clients want to know what’s the perfect length for a web page, which is like asking how long is a piece of string. The perfect length depends on what you want the page to do. On Medium, they define their page length by reading time, with the magic number being a 6-7 minute read (along with a lot of other recommendations for writing a successful Medium article ). As Medium puts their average reading speed at 275 words per minute, this gives y

The announcement of the finalists for this year’s Walkley’s awards  may be the first recognition of microcopy by the mainstream media. In the category of Headline, Caption or Hook , The Australian newspaper’s website has been nominated for its cute 404 error pages . The pages are little gags about how politicians respond to failure, like former PM Paul Keating announcing “This is the 404 we had to have.” Then there’s George Brandis saying “ If this is going to be like explaining metadata to David Speers, kindly count me out.” Over forty randomly generated messages written in the style of flubbing politicians pop up whenever you hit a page that no longer exists. Most are penned by Strewth columnist James Jeffrey , who uses these glitches as a chance to splash a few laughs across the website. Even Donald Trump gets the chance to point out The Australian 's website bugs  Rather than just a dry 404, this playful content hits a sweet spot with readers as

The best way to understand your content is by auditing it. It's a simple process of taking out that digital clipboard to tick what you’ve got and what you need. While there are several purely quantitative methods (content age or visitation), a content audit is the best way to test those opinions like "All our content is stale" or "No-one ever uses our content". It gives you the hard evidence that equips you for content improvement, migration or even killing off large parts of your website. Time to give your content a check up? (Image via  pixabay ) Brace yourself. A content audit means going through your content page by page (by page, by page…). If your site is particularly large, you might want to start with a small, representative sample – say all of the About section. Start with that to get a snapshot of your content and how it’s structured. But a full content audit is your chance to get a deep understanding of your content that should help form