Tuesday, January 4th, 2005, 7:31 am
Right to the Point
Filed under: A pattern I always come across is that of sites with long (and often pointless) drivel which rarely fits the patience span of readers. According to this item, people will not read an E-mail that is longer than 15 lines. I have come to the conclusion that the more words you write, the less words (in total) will get read.
A good exemplar of succinct reporting is Photo Matt. Here is a bad example:
The E-mail on the right was sent to me from freshmeat.net this morning. It was intended to inform me about an update to Red Feline Backup. Latest release has a progress bar! Could this E-mail not be made shorter?
January 4th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
…and don’t foget, some readers may not even make it to that “verbose diatibe†of 15 lines had they not survived the 8 second rule for the loading of that webpage.
January 4th, 2005 at 4:58 pm
Well, that’s true, in particular in my case. I still try to optimise the heavy load of my page. I recently layered the menu on the right so that fewer options are displayed. I also lowered the number of items to be displayed at the front page.