Order, today

If you're like me, the page pictured above makes you want to lie down.

When I look at this, my eyes frantically search for something to latch onto, and I find myself thinking that before I lie down, I should ORDER TODAY. After that, I'll lie down and try to divest my brain of the static that seems to have lodged there since I loaded this page.

I know: I'm overly dramatic. Sometimes, Alida, I tell myself, you just need to knuckle down and read all the words to imbibe information from the web.

But, really. Back at the Writing for the Internet Community College, the first class I took was Little Paras 101. There I learned to make each para small, and to make it start with some exciting words that tip off scanners as to what's in the para.

That, we learned, was the way to create order, today, in the chaos of online text: use word flags, signposts, whitespace -- headings, if you have them at your disposal -- and a lot of hinting. Accordingly, most of the time, writers try to write so that scanners can imply the thread of a story, roughly, by glancing at each para's first few words.

What about the readers?, you may ask. Well, they're getting the full story, the lucky, dedicated so-and-sos. But the scanners are effectively the lowest common denominator. I say this as a scanner myself. If you've catered to me and my moronic approach to web content, you've catered to the whole barrel of monkeys.

Perhaps, the cynic advances, the whole purpose of the page is to get me to order today: overwhelm users with words and a portion of them, in looking for an escape, will click on the pretty, inviting picture rather than the Back button. That ad is for the print version of this online publication -- Fast Company magazine.

But if I find the publication's content daunting before I even begin to read it, I posit that I will be unlikely to order today. I'm not about to pay money to be daunted.

The proposed defence, in this case, is that the article pictured here is an excerpt from a book. Yes, we could muse wryly all day over the clash of media, readability, content transferability, and [cue ellipsis here]. But the truth is: users don't care whether it's a book excerpt or a Martian communique beamed in from outer space. They just want smaller paragraphs.

Get a content editor to insert a couple of paragraph breaks where currently there are none. By all means, clear it with the publisher. But do it, because without that, you limit your readership automatically on the basis of layout, rather than content.

Evidence? I tried to read this article, but all I know was what's on the cover image at the top left of the page. And that I should ORDER TODAY.