By Stacey King Gordon on August 17, 2011

Long and deep: two adjectives that can mean so many things. (Yes, Beavis, heh-heh, they sound dirty too.) But when applied to web content, they are descriptors that can make people shudder.

Somewhere along the way, we all started believing that a long page of web content was certain death for our marketing efforts. And that if you’re talking deep and detailed, you most certainly must be talking “long,” which equates to “bad.”

I was speaking recently to an agency partner about a project we were working on together. One of the stated goals of the project from the client’s point of view was to “prevent scrolling” — the client felt the pages were too long, and therefore prospective clients weren’t engaging with the content.

But then we dug a little more deeply. Prospects were complaining that they couldn’t find the relevant information they needed to make decisions on the website. In the sales process, salespeople were getting stuck on a number of misperceptions — that the offering wasn’t fully baked yet, that it wouldn’t fit the lifestyle of the people considering buying it. Prospects were walking away for the wrong reasons.

As part of the content strategy we proposed, the site would offer a lot more detail: real substance that would help prospective clients put their minds at ease and appeal to them with satisfying details.

The reaction from the agency partner was predictable: how could we propose "deeper" when the client was demanding to go "shorter?" Wasn't it counterintuitive?

Head for the goalposts!

The nasty reputation of long web content emerged around the same time as the myth that "people don't read online" — which we know in actuality to be true when the content isn't relevant, but untrue when people find what they are looking for and settle in for a good read.

When people ask me what the ideal length of web content should be, I give them one of those annoying and nebulous answers we all used to get from our college professors when we asked about the word count for our term papers: "Make it as long as it needs to be."

The point is that it's important to give people the information they're looking for, delivering the right amount of detail based on what customers need to make their decisions or get what they need out of their experience with your site.

If that means going long, so be it. If that means going deep, that's OK too. We should always be mindful that "long and deep" when it pertains to web content presents certain challenges for web readers, and pay special attention to how content is designed and presented:

• Think in "chunks," with skimmable subheads to break up copy
• Include visuals, such as maps or charts, where relevant
• Think through the flow of information — would this be presented best across multiple pages, or would one page do?

For this particular client, we designed a content strategy that balanced thoughtfully designed pages that allowed consumers to easily navigate a great deal of information without getting lost in, or turned off by, overwhelming amounts of content. The new site will support the company's sales process by giving savvy buyers the information they actually want (instead of insulting their intelligence by glossing over details).

The long and the short of it (I couldn't resisit) is that we don't have to discount the content to create a great user experience for customers.

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