Last time we wrote about deleting the plausible-sounding falsehoods the AI produced. This time it is about deleting text that was not false.
At one point, it was all written
The home page carried everything we wanted to say. The problems people run into, what we can do, why clients choose us, a word from our director, how a job runs. None of it was untrue.
Then we read it back, and the honest reaction was this.
I cannot tell what this is trying to say.
We measured it
Saying “it feels like a lot” gets you nowhere. We measured it in a browser.
| Home page | What we do page | |
|---|---|---|
| Body text | 2,481 characters | 1,774 characters |
| Scroll length | about 8 screens’ worth | about 6 screens’ worth |
| Number of sections | 8 | 5 |
A typical company home page runs to 4–5 screens and around 1,200–1,500 characters. We had exactly twice that.
The cause was repetition, not volume
A clearer number came out of counting how often each word appeared on the home page.
| Word | Times |
|---|---|
| photo (写真) | 13 |
| extra / additional (追加) | 8 |
| system (システム) | 6 |
The same point — “we send you progress photos” — appeared in 8 places on the home page alone. The hero lead-in, the labels below it, the answers to the problems section, the explanation of the system, the bullet list under it, the reasons clients choose us, the director’s message, and the top of the What we do page.
For a reader, that is “I just read this” seven times over. It was not that there was too much information — it was that the same information was being read seven times.
The structure itself was doubled up too. The 4 items under “does any of this sound familiar?” and the 5 items under “how we work” mapped almost one to one. And the problems side already contained the answers. In effect we were showing the same table twice, with the answers filled in.
Why did it end up like that? Because we wanted to get our strongest point across, so we put it in every section. The result was that the strongest point got diluted.
What we cut
| What we did | Effect |
|---|---|
| Took the answers out of the problems section, leaving 4 cards with just the questions | “How we work” below it became the answer — a set-up and a pay-off |
| Removed the one item in “how we work” that completely overlapped with the system | 5 items → 4 |
| Cut the body of the remaining 4 items from about 130 characters each to about 70 | |
| Cut the hero lead-in to a single sentence | The first screen only needs to say what line of work we are in |
| Kept two paragraphs of the director’s message on the home page, moved the full text to About us | |
| Removed the 3-step “from enquiry to start of works” | The What we do page already had a 6-step version |
Here is the result.
| Before | After | |
|---|---|---|
| Home page characters | 2,481 | 1,587 (−36%) |
| “photo” on the home page | 13 | 6 |
| What we do page characters | 1,774 | 1,316 (−26%) |
On the What we do page we did not cut so much as fold things away. The 6 steps of how a job runs are information someone arriving from a search needs. So rather than deleting it, we show only the headings at first.
What we learned
Say the most important thing once, in the strongest place.
That is the whole of it. Writing the same thing in 8 places does not get it across 8 times as well. It only dilutes it.
When you build a website, you inevitably want to include this and that as well. The person who put it there has read all of it, so they do not notice there is too much. Measuring it makes you notice.
If your own site feels long to you, try counting how many times the same word appears. That is usually where the culprit is.
Next time we will write about what still is not filled in at this point.
In this series
- The phone was the only way in
- Building it alongside an AI
- Cut, cut, and cut again (this post)
- Loose ends outstanding before launch