Web Content: Never Start a Sentence with "Well"

You don't want to be the writer who begins your product marketing page with three long paragraphs about the problem, followed by the solution paragraph starting with "Well, ...". 

Don't:

Have you ever found yourself in the middle of a flood? You're walking down the street minding your own business, when suddenly water starts gushing toward you? It's a bad feeling.  

Or perhaps you're sitting at home watching the rugby game and your dishwasher overflows. You run around trying to mop it up, but it just flows and flows, and suddenly water is all over your house. Yikes. 

Well, there's a solution to all this!!! A way to keep your home safe and be safe walking down the street as well. It's called the MasterUmbrellaTM and it will save you aggravation and money, and keep your shoes and carpet dry at the same time!

Any web content - your blog, a self-help article, product description, ezine article, business report, department description, marketing copy - needs to:

1. Get to the point right away. (In grade school we were taught to begin with opening paragraphs and lots of filler. And for certain kinds of reports - scientific papers, observations, medical description - you still want to start with descriptions. But for most web content, just get right to it. Otherwise you will lose your reader.)

2.  Never begin a sentence with "well" under any circumstance. If someone's pointing a gun to your head, still do not type the word "well."

3.  Break up your web content with illustrations, template design, color, mixed fonts and sizes, charts, diagrams, or tables. Reading copy on a screen is tiring enough - don't let your article be the one that finally puts the reader to sleep.

4.  If possible, try to avoid having the reader keep turning the page. Some web content is designed for advertisements, and when you're writing in that context you'll often have to format each of your 10 money-saving car-buying tips on 10 separate pages, in order for the company to display more ads. But if you're the boss of you, don't make readers keep hitting "next." You will lose them.