There's been a lot of talk about the length of copy on web pages. The war wages regularly between those who say short copy works better and those who favor long copy. And while I am not foolish enough to declare a winner, I would like to offer my observations…

If any of you have visited our site over the last couple of months, you may have noticed that our homepage has changed. We've done several things to improve the site, but one of the more interesting changes has to do with the length of the copy on the homepage.

In the previous version of our site, we had set up our homepage as a jump page. The page was about 200 words in length and contained a set of links to secondary pages with more details. Nothing exciting here. Many companies do the same sort of thing.

In particular, however, there was a link to a page that extolled the uniqueness of our courses. This is an important page because it explains why people should buy "our" courses instead of the "other" guys.

In the previous design, we'd decided not to put all that nasty marketing stuff in our customer's faces. We thought we would be polite and simply put a link to it. You know, let people visit the page once they had an overall sense of the site.

There was one slight problem. When we looked at our website statistics, we discovered that no one was visiting the second page. Nobody was finding out why our courses were so unique. Now I don't mind telling you, we found this news somewhat "troubling". So, as an experiment, we decided to move the secondary information to our homepage. In doing so however, we would be making the homepage longer. Four times longer.

Needless to say, we wondered whether anyone would read the page. The internal debate raged, but in the end, we decided to try it. So in our "best" pyramid writing style, we re-wrote the homepage. The results are rather interesting…

First, the number of people who left our site after viewing only the homepage has dropped by about 5%. In other words, more people are now visiting more than our homepage. To be clear, at the time we took the measurement, the only thing that had changed on the site was the length and content of the copy on the homepage.

Many of the other web statistics have remained about the same. For example, people still spend about the same amount of time on our site and they still like to visit the same places. It's just that proportionally more people visit those places.

Second, we've also noticed that our enrollments have increased by about 20%. Now, before the "long copy zealots" get too excited, I think the increase could be based on many factors. For example, it could simply be that the economy is finally starting to gather some steam. Or it could be the "content" of the long copy, rather than the length.

So while it's too early to declare a winner, the results are promising. People seem to be reading the copy. Going forward, our next step will be to work on the readability of the site. But I'll save that story for another issue.