Producing web pages? Then know your cows from your tigers.

If only the geek in cyberland who chose the name ‘Web Browser’ had done better. Browsing is something you do in a book store – scanning shelves in a fairly random fashion to see if something catches your eye.

Browsing is no more than an unfocused and non-energetic scan. As Webster’s Dictionary puts it, ‘Reading superficially or at random’.

Webster’s has another definition too – ‘The act of feeding by continual nibbling’. It’s about how cows eat – which was the origin of the word. And this kind of activity has nothing at all to do with the way people engage the internet. So people wanting others to feed on their web content had better not treat them as ‘grazing cows’.

It simply won’t do to just plant lush grass and wait for some imaginary browsers to come nibbling by. Yet that is too often what I see happening or am asked to do. ‘We want people to know so we’ll put it on a web page’ is one of the most fruitless ideas in the communication toolbox.

Rather, web users behave like wild beasts - tigers – hunting for food. Restlessly seeking that which must be found. Committed to using the least energy for the greatest return in doing so.

Which means if we want our web food to be eaten we have to put it where it can most easily be found, with sign after sign that ‘this is the right place’.  So -

• Put it under a label that tells the hunter exactly what it is – and in their language and not ours.
• Don’t disguise what is out there by trying to be subtle, or smartypants. So no clues to be cracked or puns to be unravelled.
• Don’t hide the evidence that this is the right place in an undergrowth of dense copy. But put key words in bold and break information into bullet points.

By thinking ‘tigers’ not ‘cows’ you are a long way there to getting the foundations right for the web. That’s not all there is too it but it is the biggest part of the story.

Perhaps if we’d been using something called a ‘Web Hunter’ instead of a ‘Web Browser’ all these years it would have been more obvious. Or if we had taken more notice of the name ‘Search Engine’. If only.