The latest issue of “Free Range Thinking” reviews a new book by Ginny Redish called “Letting Go of the Words,” which contains advice for developing websites that actually hook visitors instead of scaring them off. The book compiles a vareity of information from “usability studies” — research projects that methodically monitor how Internet users behave when they visit a website for the first time, and tweak those sites to increase the how long visitors stay and how deeply they explore.

I’ll confess that I haven’t read the book yet, just the interview with the author — but I agree with what she has to say. Describing the most common mistake she sees, Ginny says:

The top one is probably dense text — walls of words. They send the message ‘This is going to be really hard for you to deal with.’

She notes that businesses and organizations of all kinds share this weakness with nature protection and pollution control organizations:

…people have a hard time letting go of their words. Internal focus happens because the user isn’t at the table when the site is being built.

Check out Letting Go of the Words. It’s written about websites but it seems like it’s got good advice for a wide variety of marketing and communications efforts.