As a web designer and business analyst, I tend to see recurring problems with web design and, in particular, web content management. The problem is industry lingo – terms and definitions that are common to people inside an industry but foreign to those outside the industry.
Great example: I have a client who performs oral surgery on his patients. Once, I asked him what his specialty was and he told me, “third molar extractions.” Then I asked what the heck that was. He replied, “removing your wisdom teeth.” In his website, he writes in clinical and scientific terminology, which is great if you hope to attract other dentists and surgeons but it doesn’t help you get found on Google if your intended target audience is a mom simply trying to get her son’s wisdom teeth pulled.
It is crucial that when you write for the web and hope to attract the attention of your target audience that you write using their language, not yours. We are starting to do a lot of work for scientific organizations and the problem there is even worse. Fortunately, we have identified and developed a solution that we call, “context sensitive glossary tool tips.”
What this means is that you create a glossary on your website and simplify all those complex terms that you tend to use. Then, as you blog or write new web content, those terms are dynamically highlighted so that when you mouseover an underlined term, the glossary definition pops up as a tool tip. And, if you click on the link, you actually go to the full glossary definition.
This beautifully elegant solution not only makes your web content more user-friendly, readable, and usable – but in addition, it makes your entire website more search engine friendly (SEF) and search engine optimized (SEO).
