Case Study: Creating Custom Stories for Children's Events

For several years now, I have published books of spooky stories, which you can find on Amazon as the Dangerous Corner series. So when I heard about the Normanby Hall Pumpkin Festival taking place in my hometown of Scunthorpe, I was inspired to write some custom stories for children to hear at the event.

I grew up in Scunthorpe and visited Normanby Hall Country Park regularly - I still do, any time I go home to visit my parents. The Hall itself is a Regency mansion built in 1825, and it's set in 300 acres of land that includes woodland, gardens, duck ponds and a deer park.

Normanby Hall Christmas 2024 © Bobble Bardsley

This all provided the perfect backdrop for three bespoke short stories for children attending the Normanby Hall Pumpkin Festival in 2026, which I wrote and sent over to the organisers, 2B Events. I was delighted when they replied and said they would be using my stories in their witch's storytelling corner.

Engaging Custom Stories for Kids

I wanted to write three custom stories for kids aged 10 and under, since that's the main audience at a typical pumpkin patch event. To keep the kids engaged, I added plenty of interest and interactivity to each story:

• Venue-specific details to make the story unique
• Sound effects for the reader to perform
• Age-appropriate atmosphere without peril
• End with an activity: find, explore or observe

Each story is about 500 words long, which means one story can be performed in 2-3 minutes, and all three can be completed in about 10 minutes at a steady pace. Again, this is ideal for the attention span of the audience, who might be excited to go and pick their pumpkins.

About the Stories

You can read the full stories in the linked downloadable PDFs but to summarise, here are 'The Hauntings of Normanby Hall'...

The Broken Broomstick

A witch-themed story perfect for an in-character witch to read aloud, and popular with the audiences during the first weekend of the 2026 Pumpkin Festival. An original character, a witch named Ashlar, flies between the chimneys of Normanby Hall but crashes and breaks her broom.

She turned to pick up her broomstick. But when she saw where it had landed, she found it had snapped in two pieces! There it was on the rooftop, broken in half, surrounded by splinters of wood and fallen bristles.

Ashlar grumbled. She would need a new broomstick. But the bristles were already blowing away into the night. What was she going to do?

Children are encouraged to find a new broomstick for Ashlar while walking in the woods (still a safe and secure part of Normanby Hall Country Park!). Just 3 hours after the event started on the first day, children had already started leaving potential broomsticks leaning up against trees in the park.

Download The Broken Broomstick by Bobble Bardsley (Printable PDF on Google Drive)

The Midnight March

Can the ghosts of dead animals be cosy characters for a child-friendly spooky story? I think so! Normanby Hall has a pet cemetery that visitors can go and see, so I based a story around that as a unique local landmark.

Out from the shadows between the trees stepped Joey, the elegant stag, his antlers twinkling with the last of the starlight. He strode right past the little mouse, pausing to give her a friendly boop with his gentle snout. Like the others, Joey looked like a silver mist, but his nose felt soft and warm in the cold night.

The story sees the spirits of past pets parade from the cemetery to the open grass in front of Normanby Hall, where they play in the moonlight until morning. Kids are encouraged to look out for the pet cemetery when walking through the grounds, as it is a signposted point of interest.

Download The Midnight March by Bobble Bardsley (Printable PDF on Google Drive)

The Rusty Red Railroad

Normanby Park once had its own railway station, which was used to transport freight from the nearby steelworks. The steelworks are a significant presence in Scunthorpe and provide a useful connection to the town's past.

I watched it race towards me, and at the controls I saw a man with rosy red cheeks, hair that burned red like fire, and a bright red peaked cap balanced right on the top of his head.

He waved and pulled the whistle cord as the ghostly freight train thundered past and disappeared into the night, leaving only an orange-red glow on the horizon and a distant, fading shrieeeek of the whistle...

In The Rusty Red Railroad, there's plenty of atmospheric build-up, before the appearance of a glowing red ghost train driven by an original character, Rusty Red. The story ends by linking the train with the red glow that appears over Scunthorpe steelworks, giving children something to look out for in future.

Download The Rusty Red Railroad by Bobble Bardsley (Printable PDF on Google Drive)

The Results: Engaged and Entertained Kids

Feedback from the event for my bespoke children's stories has been good, with kids engaged throughout each storytelling session. I was very happy to hear that the 'witch' performing the stories had ad libbed in places, as all three stories were written to allow for that.

'Broomsticks' at Normanby Hall © My Mum

The most rewarding sight for me were the 'replacement broomsticks' left leaning against trees around the park by helpful children. It's clear that younger listeners were paying attention and felt invested enough in the Ashlar character that they wanted to help her replace her broken broomstick!

Download Free Printables of the Spooky Stories

I wanted to make the stories available to anyone who attended the event or who has an interest in Normanby Hall, Scunthorpe, or just a love of child-friendly spooky stories!

You can download free printables of the spooky stories as PDFs from my Google Drive here:

• The Broken Broomstick PDF Download
• The Midnight March PDF Download
• The Rusty Red Railroad PDF Download

Each story is designed to be printed on two A4 sheets (or one double-sided) with child-friendly text size. They're great to read aloud to kids, and should be suitable for most primary-aged children to read alone, with very little actual peril and no difficult words.

Need Bespoke Children's Stories for an Event?

I'd love to provide similar venue-specific children's stories for an event in the future, whether that's another pumpkin patch, or a Christmas festival, or any other celebration. They're an affordable way to give your event a truly personal touch for audiences of any age.

Contact me if you'd like to discuss your upcoming event, venue or general location, and the potential to use some of that local knowledge to create bespoke stories for children attending your event. I'll always try to come up with an option that suits the size and budget of your event, however big or small.

Frequently Asked Questions

If your question isn't answered here, please email me and I'll be happy to help.

What types of events do you write stories for?

Pretty much anything - the joy of writing custom stories for events is that they can be tailored to the type of event you are organising. If that's a very young audience, the stories can be low-stakes and use very simple words. If your event is for adults, we can raise the peril and be more descriptive.

How far in advance do I need to book custom event story writing?

Again it depends on the event, and if I will need to research the location to give you authentic bespoke stories. In general, for child-friendly stories of about 500 words each (like the examples above) I really don't need long to produce a first draft. Let me know your deadlines and I'll make sure you have your stories in time.

Do you come and read the stories yourself?

Not usually - I write the stories and send them to you as printable PDFs (or another preferred format) and you give them to your own entertainers to read. This allows them to be performed in-character and keeps the cost as low as possible for you. If you really WANT me to attend in-person to read the stories, let me know, as I may be available for an appropriate fee.

Get in Touch to Hire an Event Storywriter

Contact me to ask about location-based custom children's stories for your upcoming event (or adults' stories, if appropriate!) and we can get the ball rolling. If you're working to a deadline to organise your event, or you know the date on which it will begin, please let me know upfront and I can schedule the work to make sure your stories are completed in time.

How to Turn Off YouTube Live Stream XP and Crowns (aka Live Chat Leaderboard)

Today I tuned into the Sunday Morning Cities Skylines Livestream by Joy Builds Cities, a weekly visit to Cider River and a refuge from all the noise. We hang out, tell terrible jokes in the live chat, and Joy builds her beautifully detailed city week by week.

Today when we started chatting, we noticed little crowns alongside some people's names in the chat: YouTube have introduced a Live Chat Leaderboard, similar to TikTok live streams, with an XP total for participating and a crown for the three noisiest people.

If you have also encountered this and you want to know how to turn off YouTube live stream crowns, leaderboard and XP, you'll find it buried quite deep into your account settings.

What is the YouTube Live Chat Leaderboard?

Here's how YouTube describes the Live Chat Leaderboard:

So to score XP, you need to post in the chat, send Super Chats and/or Super Stickers. And it resets when you join a new/different stream, so you're not losing out on a running total if you turn it off.

(Note also, if you opt out of the leaderboard as a viewer, you can still participate in the chat as normal, and everyone else who is still opted in can still score points - you just don't see all the clutter in your own chat.)

If you'd rather follow the instructions on YouTube's own Help Centre, you can find that link here.

How to turn off YouTube Live Chat crowns

For me, the 'crowns' that appear alongside the top 3 fans in the chat are the main reason to turn this feature off. They're visual clutter in a part of the screen that is already not especially spacious.

To opt out of YouTube Live Chat leaderboards, follow these steps:

On Desktop

Click on your profile picture at the top-right of YouTube (alongside the notification bell) and click Settings.

On the YouTube Settings page, click Privacy.

Turn ON the third toggle Live chat - Turn off leaderboard participation.

(It's an opt-out, so you have to turn it ON to opt out, which will then turn OFF the crowns and the leaderboard. Super logical.)

On Mobile

In the YouTube app, go to the You tab.

Select Settings, then Live Chat.

Select Turn off leaderboard participation.

Does it matter?

No! If you enjoy it, leave it on. If you find it distracting, turn it off. I can see how the leaderboard might be fun for some streams. It does feel like a reaction to TikTok's participation coins that viewers earn for watching and chatting, but that's OK.

Honestly I'm just glad YouTube gives us the option to turn this off. As I said, it's only really the crowns next to the top 3 fans in the chat itself that I find problematic - a less intrusive symbol, such as a gold, silver or bronze medal, and I would probably leave this turned on.

Content Hacks: How to upload content without formatting

Back in my SEO agency days, we delivered content by uploading it directly to the customer's website. That was usually done using RSS, but if a client's website was built using WordPress, we would upload it via their WP admin page instead.

Some of my colleagues would write the page from scratch directly into WordPress, which at the time didn't always save every edit immediately. More than a few times, an internet glitch erased entire articles, with no way to restore the lost content.

This is just one reason why I prefer to write content in Microsoft Word, with my active document backed up to OneDrive in real time. Every edit I make is immediately stored online in the cloud, I can roll back to previous versions if I spot a significant error, and I can access my documents from other computers if I need to.

But of course, MS Word adds all sorts of formatting to the text. In some cases this can be helpful - I have standard Styles set up for H1, H2 and H3 subheadings, which makes it easier to structure my content in the way it will appear on the website.

At times though, this formatting can be a hindrance. My own blog is powered by Blogger, which gives me two ways to paste content from Word:

1. 'Compose' view with full MS Word formatting
2. 'HTML' view with no formatting at all

(There is a 'clear formatting' option hidden away at the far-right of the Blogger toolbar, but this Content Hack is a quick and easy way to achieve the same thing on any PC, for any CMS.)

What's the problem?

The problem with pasting formatted content into a CMS is that you get a lot of unnecessary HTML code, which can do weird things to your page layout. Paragraphs can end up double-spaced, or not spaced at all, fonts may display incorrectly, and you risk losing valuable SEO-friendly HTML tags like H2 and H3 headings.

Conversely, when you paste completely unformatted content into HTML view, many CMS platforms will ignore line breaks (unless each line break is marked with a <br> or <p> tag) and your entire page will post as a single block of text with no paragraphs.

What you need is a middle ground solution, whereby the text posts without font formatting (allowing you to add your CSS styles in place of the MS Word formats) but keeps those line breaks, paragraphs, subheadings and lists.

Blogger's 'Clear formatting' option is hidden on a secondary menu.

On Blogger, the 'clear formatting' button can do this after pasting formatted text into Compose view - but is there an easy way to clear formatting before uploading the content to your CMS?

The easy way to clear MS Word formatting

There is a reliable solution to this problem, and it's one I use often. It can also be useful to copy and paste weirdly formatted text into a Word document, if 'paste unformatted' is giving you strange results.

It's simply this:

1. Copy your content from MS Word
2. Paste your content into Notepad
3. Copy your content from Notepad
4. Paste your content into your CMS
5. Add your HTML/CSS formatting

Notepad can now be configured to display text in the font of your choice, but it essentially still works with plain, unformatted text. You can even still turn off Word Wrap on the View menu, if you only want to see where you have inserted manual line breaks.

Because of this, when you copy content from Notepad and paste it into a CMS in Compose view, you get line breaks where you want them, but plain text apart from that.

But now my text isn't formatted...??

True, but that's actually the desirable outcome. It's much better to paste unformatted text (but with line breaks) and then add minimal formatting using HTML and CSS, than it is to paste formatted text and expect Microsoft Word formatting to look right online.

Of course, if you hire a good freelance writer for website content, they can handle all of this for you - if you want me to upload content directly on to your website (or save it into Drafts so you can check it before publishing) I can do that and apply the relevant HTML formatting and CSS styles throughout the page as needed.

But if you're trying to upload content written in Microsoft Word and struggling to clear fonts and formatting without losing all your paragraph breaks, this is one quick and easy solution to get your text into a more workable format (or not-format, as the case may be...).

And in case you're wondering - yes, I do use this method myself. I also have shortcuts set up to paste into MS Word without keeping any font formatting, so as far as possible, the only styles and formatting in my content are those I've added myself.

Need help with this issue?

Feel free to contact me via email or on my socials if you want any help with this issue, or if you'd like to discuss content for your website or blog. I can either deliver pages in a Microsoft Word document, via Google Docs or directly to your CMS.

I'm familiar with various CMS platforms, including WordPress, and I can add any Custom Fields your website template relies on, as well as SEO meta titles, descriptions and so on. Just ask if you need me to allow time for any of these extras, which I can usually do at no extra cost.

Why to hire a CEO blog ghostwriter

Writing a CEO blog is a great way to show your knowledge as an entrepreneur and set yourself apart as an inspirational business leader, but it can be time consuming and not everyone finds it easy to put words on paper.

As your company grows, you're likely to outsource much of your marketing (or hire an in-house marketing exec to handle it). But your blog needs extra care, because it represents you as an individual, as well as your organisation as a whole.

A business man in a purple suit.

Taking the decision to hire a CEO blog ghostwriter can give you the dedicated talent you need to produce regular, insightful blog posts for your website, written with good spelling and grammar, but still keeping your own tone of voice, figures of speech and any catchphrases you like to use.

In my freelance career I have been hired as a CEO blog ghostwriter several times, working with business leaders across the UK to write first-person pages that accurately reflect their views, while including all the SEO keywords and marketing calls-to-action needed to turn blog visits into sales.

Entrepreneurship can sometimes feel lonely at the top of the ladder, but you're not up there on your own. Reach out at any time and you'll find likeminded, motivated people like me who are ready and willing to help in a freelance capacity.

What is a CEO blog ghostwriter?

OK, so what's the difference between a CEO blog ghostwriter and a general freelance content writer? It all comes down to tone of voice and the ability to write in a style convincingly similar to your own.

We're already in a world where AI is rapidly gaining the ability to do this too, but you'll typically find AI-generated content to be wide of the mark, often in ways that are hard to pin down or correct. It's that 'uncanny valley' feeling of content that just sounds... weird.

By working with a human freelancer like me, you can give me any examples of your own writing, or have me work from a video or podcast. Alternatively, just give me a few bullet points of what you want your blog post to say, and a pointer on tone of voice, and I can come up with a first draft we can hone together.

A good CEO blog ghostwriter will deliver good-quality content while taking all of the following into account:

• Writing to match your tone of voice and phrasing
• Including SEO keywords and CTAs
• Reducing time and effort needed from you
• Editing (if needed) to get wording spot-on
• Adding research and context about your industry

By providing some thoughts of your own and letting your freelance blog ghostwriter add their own research, you'll often end up with an even more insightful finished blog post than if you had written it yourself.

In the end, it's about making your life easier so you can focus on running your business. As a freelancer, I know self-promotion isn't always easy, especially when there are more pressing priorities on a day-to-day basis.

How to start a CEO blog

What if you don't already have a CEO blog, but you want to start one with the help of a ghostwriter?

There are a few things to check first:

1. Does your website template include a blog/news section you can post to?
2. Do you have ideas about what you want to say on your blog?
3. Is your ghostwriter familiar with CSS, SEO and website formatting?
4. Are you planning to upload your content, or do you want your freelancer to do it?
5. How much content (and how regularly delivered) do you want?

A full-time freelance content writer should be able to commit to the schedule you need, without any gaps in delivery. Consider working with a ghostwriter who can create content several weeks in advance, so you always have a stockpile of scheduled blog posts to keep going through any unavoidable absences.

Once you've got a good idea of what you want from your blog, it's time to agree a content schedule with your freelance ghostwriter. You can start with a single page if you want to test the waters, or set out a plan for daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly blog posts over the next 3-6 months.

It's also sensible to set an approximate word count for each page. For the best performance in Google Search results/rankings, this should be at least 1,000-1,500 words, but this is a very general rule of thumb. Your SEO agency (if you have one) can help with this decision, or you can trust your freelancer to write the number of words needed.

The work you put in early on will help to make sure your ghostwriter produces better content even within a matter of days or weeks. Don't be afraid to provide constructive feedback, especially when it comes to your tone of voice.

Remember, authenticity is one of the critical factors in a CEO blog, so make sure your ghostwriter does a good job of 'sounding' like you.

How to organise a CEO blog

As you start to build up a collection of blog posts, it's a good idea to introduce some simple organisation to keep posts on similar topics together.

Most content management systems (CMS - your website's admin page e.g. WordPress) support categories and topic tags. As you add new posts to your blog, you select one or more categories to group posts according to their subject matter.

This helps you to provide an organised archive for visitors to your blog, where they can read more of your insights on each topic just by clicking a category link. It's also a good way to signpost to the search engines that pages are related to each other in some way, which can help to reinforce your search rankings.

Again, if this is something you're not confident about, that doesn't matter. Your freelance writer, SEO agency, web designer or in-house marketing team should all be able to help.

Planning a weekly agenda for scheduled blog posts.

You might even find categories help you when it comes to planning future content. For instance, if your blog has four main categories, you might decide to post one page per week and cycle through those topics, so each section receives one update per month.

Organising your blog should (by definition) help to organise your content creation process too - so ask your ghostwriter if you need an expert opinion on how to do this.

Get a CEO blog ghostwriter today

If you'd like to know more about my services as a CEO blog ghostwriter, please email me or contact me via my socials. My emails come through to my phone, so that's the best way to reach me wherever I am (flag your email as important if you need a reply urgently).

As a full-time career freelancer, I make it my business to be available whenever possible. I'm also very flexible whether you want a single blog post to see how well it performs, or you're ready to dive right into a long-term CEO blog content schedule.

My prices are competitive and I'm open to offers. I write everything from scratch - I don't use AI to generate anything - so there aren't massive economies of scale, but I am open to negotiation for larger orders and long-term commitments.

I've always found ghostwriting CEO blogs to be really rewarding. As a writer, it's both challenging and interesting to mimic another person's way of writing (or speaking) as closely as possible, especially when they have genuine insight and entrepreneurial spirit to share.

Let me know if you have any questions about my services or about anything on this page. I'm available all year round with very few days off, so please get in touch and we can start planning your first blog posts immediately.

Formatting for Readability: How to Make Pages Pop

Good content is the best first step you can take towards improving your search engine rankings. Content is what the search engines look for, it's how they know what your website is about, and publishing new pages regularly is one of the easiest ways to build your search presence over time.

Technical issues, like how fast your pages load and whether they look right on mobile devices, are also important. But they should be a one-and-done fix, and ideally should be designed into your website from the day it's first built.

Content is the long-term strategy to add to your website, keep it looking relevant (and alive) and help to expand your audience reach into new topics and new SEO keywords.

But it's crucial that you make your pages readable to human visitors, with clear structure and plenty of white space. In the end, it's human readers who turn into paying customers - search rankings and traffic alone usually don't make money.

In this guide I'll look at how to format a page for readability and why it's important to get this right when you publish new pages. By formatting for readability, you can make sure good content performs at its best.

Readability and User Experience

User Experience, or UX, is the overall quality of experience visitors receive when they visit your website. It includes practical things like whether your navigation works, whether your links are broken, and whether your page template displays correctly on their device.

Readability plays a big part in UX. A lot of online content is in the form of text, especially on a blog, a marketing landing page, an ecommerce product description, or even on pages like recipes and DIY how-tos.

If a visitor can't read your content easily, they're likely to click off and go to a different website. The time they spend on your page (or on your website overall) is called 'dwell time' and you'll usually find it in your website analytics reports, because it's important.

How does readability help?

Readability is part of UX by definition. Making a page more readable fundamentally improves its UX, and to a large extent this is something you can do using predefined formatting, so that you don't have to spend ages on the readability of individual pages.

There are several different aspects to formatting for readability. It's partly about content and partly about design. Here are some examples:

Design

• Column width
• Padding and margins
• Font size
• Clear contrast colour schemes
• White space

Content

• Clear structure (subheadings, bullet points etc)
• Short sentences and paragraphs
• Well-structured sentences
• Jargon/acronyms explained
• Good SEO keyword inclusion

That last point might sound surprising - how can SEO keywords improve readability? But actually, keywords do the same thing for human readers as they do for the search engine robots: they highlight the main topics and themes of the page and repeat them to help hammer them home.

Good SEO content actually improves readability, instead of harming it. That's why you should always hire an SEO writer who knows how to include keywords in a sensible, natural-sounding way.

Elements of Readability

Let's look at how some of the elements mentioned above help to improve the readability of your page. It's not always necessary to include all of these in every page - your content might naturally favour a slightly different structure or format - but these are a good way to start structuring a typical SEO landing page.

Column Width

Most people are used to reading pages of standard paper sizes like A5, A4 or letter. We have an expectation of how long one line of text will be. Go too far beyond that expectation, and content starts to look strange and becomes much harder to scan.

That's why most websites have a fixed central column width for their main content. Oftentimes, websites have a fixed width overall, and just show white or coloured margins to the left and right of that.

It can feel like a waste of screen space, but it's better for readability. With more people using mobile devices, it also helps to make your desktop page template look similar to the narrower, vertical aspect ratio of a smartphone screen.

White Space

Leaving white space around your text again helps readers to scan it without getting distracted by other page clutter. Your main page content should have plenty of white space in and around it (although obviously there's a sweet spot, to avoid content looking orphaned on the page).

Some simple examples of this include a margin around the main column, padding between paragraphs, and if it feels right, a small gap between lines in the same paragraph. Increasing your line height by even just a few pixels can stop text-heavy pages from feeling cluttered.

(NB 'White' space doesn't have to be white. If your website has a background colour, it's absolutely fine to show that background in the spaces between text. Just make sure the colour scheme overall has enough contrast that it's easy to read - and if possible, allow visitors to override it using their browser's high-contrast colour scheme, if they are visually impaired.)

Page Structure

This is the big one, and it's another reason why you should hire a website content writer if you're not confident about writing long pages of in-depth SEO content yourself.

In terms of your content, page structure is everything from headings and subheadings, bullet points and quotes, down to putting paragraph breaks in sensible places and even keeping sentences short. None of this changes the message of your page - in fact lists and quotes can reinforce the most important points.

Structuring your page can help to make your content more accessible to a less-informed reader. You're not 'dumbing down' your content, you're just displaying it in a way that's easier to follow, allowing readers to take a visual break and look away from their screen, without losing their place.

Jargon and Acronyms

OK, maybe your business is in a technical niche or an expert sector like science, engineering or law. That doesn't mean you can't publish content that includes specialist knowledge - in fact you definitely should be showing that level of expertise, if you have it.

But you can write out acronyms in full the first time you use them (e.g. the way I first mentioned User Experience on this page) or explain what jargon means before you go on to use it elsewhere on the page.

Some people will tell you to avoid jargon altogether. I don't think that's really necessary, as long as it's jargon that a reasonably well-informed audience will understand, and you include a quick definition upfront for anyone who's new to a technical term or niche concept.

SEO Keywords

I've said it once but it's worth repeating. The best SEO content writers can include difficult keywords in natural-sounding ways, multiple times in prominent places on the page. Keywords should ideally be in the heading, subheadings, hyperlink anchor text and so on.

This is at the very heart of on-page SEO, as those keywords help the search engines to understand what your page is about. If Google doesn't know what you're talking about, nothing else matters, no matter how fast or mobile-friendly your website may be.

But keywords also act as signposts for human readers. For example on this page, you can tell that I'm talking about readability and formatting, but also aspects of search engine optimisation and professional content writing - because those topics are signposted throughout the page.

Writing for Readability

Let's assume you've got a website design that lends itself to good readability (modern websites do this using Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS, to define design elements like line height, font size, margins and padding across all your pages - speak to your web designer if you want to know more).

Now how can you write content for readability, to make the most of your investment in good page design?

It's all about applying the principles already mentioned above, such as sentence and paragraph length, sensible subheadings and page sections, and highlighting valuable content using bullet points and blockquotes.

Structure your content

Content structure doesn't have to be scary and it doesn't actually need a lot of forward planning. If you have SEO keywords to include, make sure you keep those in mind and try to write subheadings that feature your priority keywords.

Other than that, you can make it up as you go along. If you find it easier to write a full page of text without any subheadings, do that first. Then go back and add in a subheading every 100-150 words or so.

Short sentences can help with this. If you have a paragraph break every 25-30 words, it's a lot easier to find a suitable place to insert a subheading, even if you have to slightly reword the sentence that follows it.

Keep it simple

This is where an experienced content writer can really help. For good readability, you need your content to be simple - that is, short paragraphs, short sentences, shorter words where possible. Sentences should convey a clear point without running on into other issues.

At the same time, you may need to touch on some technical topics and expert-level information about your products, services or business. Striking the best balance between the two is challenging and it's one reason why I, as a freelance website writer with over 25 years' experience, prefer a plain English, conversational tone of voice that explains things as I go along.

You don't want your audience to feel patronised (and I find writing for CEO blogs and high-level law firms challenging because of this) but in general, clarity in your writing will always help your content to perform better.

Remember your audience

Finally, always keep your audience in mind. A good project brief should include at least a one-line description of the target audience. Think about age, educational level, technical expertise, and even factors like how long or short of a time they might have to spare when visiting your website.

Readability is, by definition, about writing for a human audience. Again there's a lot of overlap with making your content accessible to search engine robots, but never forget the human factor too.

If you're not confident, hire a freelance writer to help (I can proofread/edit pages you've written yourself, if you want to keep that authenticity) or use online tools like Grammarly to pick up on any obvious errors in your writing - just don't get TOO bogged down in the minor issues it identifies.

How to Get Started

To get started formatting for readability on your website, speak to your web designer about any concerns you might have with the way your pages look. Some simple steps you can take to improve your formatting include:

• Make fonts larger
• Make colours more contrasting
• Add formats for H1, H2 and H3 headers
• Give hyperlinks a stand-out look
• Add padding and white space

This shouldn't be something you have to do again and again. Once your CSS (your website's template/formatting) is set up properly, it should be applied automatically to all new pages you publish.

After that, it's just about writing content for readability. Use everything we've learned on this page, and make sure you know how to add the formatting to your page to make headings, bullet lists and so on.

If you can't do that - and a lot of people don't know how - hire a freelance writer who can upload content directly to your website for you. It might cost a little more to pay for the extra time it takes, but it should be cheaper overall than hiring a web designer just to upload new content.

To discuss anything mentioned on this page, or to hire me to write readable content for your website, get in touch with me today via email or social media, and let's get to building your website content.