If You Love Content Strategy, Click Yes
Adam Gottlieb March 8, 2009
What secrets does the black box conceal? You gotta click around to learn more. (via)
Knowledge may be power, but it can also be as dull as dirt. In the Internet’s toddler years, file repositories like Gopher ruled, filling the world with academic and corporate research and Star Trek fan fiction. The more content, the better the source and the more love it received in terms of visits.
With the invention of the browser, credited to either Marc Andreessen or Al Gore depending on your POV, design became the benchmark by which knowledge was judged by the Internet’s newest patrons: consumers. Unfortunately, this content became the clichéd square peg.
Copy and creative were mashed together, leading to infinitely scrolling home pages or—gasp!—poor comprehension of the site and brand message. This knowledge transfer abomination sadly still occurs today. So who is the true savior of Web knowledge? No, it’s not the dancing mortgage calculators or twittering anthropomorphic avatars. It’s a simple mouse click.
It is often listed as “Learn More,” or hopefully a more meaningful link name. This sublime link directs the reader to the content they are looking for, and it is content strategy’s strongest tool.
Presenting the reader with a summary of the content, rather than an entire Master’s thesis, and including a link to read the entire message, it is a three-fold strategy: sparking interest in site exploration, quenching the site visitor’s thirst for knowledge, and stoking the fires of desire to indeed “learn more”—again, please don’t use learn more as a link. Please.
