Explaining Complex Things on a Website

Explaining offers on a web page is often a non-trivial task, for reasons such as the following:
- You need to provide enough detail so that people can fully understand what you are offering.
- On the other hand, you cannot be sure that readers will be interested in all this; some of them may find some of the explanations superfluous – not relevant to them, already known, etc.
- In general, different readers will have quite different needs – for example, different interests, pre-existing knowledge, patience, etc. Therefore, it can be difficult to serve them all well.
I often face this challenge, and I would like to share some thoughts about it here. As a marketing person, for example, you can benefit from this article in a number of ways:
- You can pick up valuable ideas on how to effectively address the challenge explained on your own website.
- You will learn more about how RP Photonics works - which might be relevant if you start working with us for marketing your products.
Explaining our Advertising Offers
Over the past few days, I have once again revised the explanations of our advertising offerings. This included consolidating the information into fewer pages and better structuring it. I expect that this revision will make it significantly easier for advertisers to get the key insights.
Conveying the Key Insights
We generate the following key insight on three different pages:
- Page 1: Why is it important to work with the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide – rather than any other? What makes offers far more effective than others?
- Page 2: What exactly do we offer? What are the key features of our Advertising Package, and what details should you focus on when making a decision?
- Page 3: Once you are convinced, how do you get started?
How to Let Users Find the Right Page
It is natural to have three different pages that answer these three very different questions. However, we cannot be sure that everyone will directly get to the right page that explains exactly what they need. After all, each of these pages is usually found through a navigation item, where there is very little space to indicate what is offered on the page. These items are only labeled “RP Photonics Marketing”, “Advertising Package” and “Get Listed”, and for example, it may not always be obvious which of the first two to choose.
One way to solve this problem is to make it very clear at the top of each page what you can learn here, and in case it is not what you want, to show how to get to the right page. For example, at the top of the second page, I say:
If you need to learn first why the RP Photonics platform is the premier place for marketing photonics products, read our marketing intro page.
How to Structure Complex Information
As mentioned above, a key challenge is to provide everything that might be relevant, but at the same time not make the reader feel overwhelmed by a huge amount of text. How do you do that?
- The first and obvious measure is to carefully optimize your text:
- Is each detail really important? How can it be explained in the shortest and simplest way possible? Has it been already elsewhere? If yes, how likely is it that readers will know it already at this point? Here, you may need to think about different user groups.
- How much detail is appropriate, will often depend on the exact function of the text. For example, the actual purpose of a product description published on a list of suppliers for a certain type of product is not, as one may think, to comprehensively inform people on your products. What people really need at this particular point is something to decide which suppliers should be looked at more closely. That decision will usually not be based on product details, but rather on whether or not the supplier is likely to have something as needed. Where this decision takes too long because of too much detail, the supplier may lose out. The product details will be read later on on the website of the supplier – the crucial thing is getting people there. I accordingly advise our advertising clients, helping them to produce effective descriptions.
- Does the text look sufficiently structured? Is it visually attractive or repulsive?
- All this can be hard work. By the way, AI tools often fail on such jobs, for example by being mislead themselves. At least, you would first need to explain to the AI tool what message exactly one should bring over.
- A very important type of tool is anything that helps the user to get additional information only when needed. But how do you do that?
- One way is to put additional details on extra web pages that you link to from the main page. However, this often does not work well because users can get lost in a complex hierarchy of many pages. But having everything on a single page easily leads to a very long page which looks overwhelming.
- A better way is often to have some kind of item on a page where you can unfold additional information as needed, and possibly hide it again after reading it. I have started to use more and more so-called “accordions” as offered by jQuery UI. See for example this page itself, or our page about the Advertising package features. The first feature, which is by far the most important one, is seen at the beginning, and only those who want details about other features will open the necessary parts. In any case, you can quickly understand the structure of the whole page and what information it offers where.
Our competitors (other advertising platforms) often try to solve this problem by presenting only very limited information, with some nice graphics and little text. However, I don't think this works well. For example, they list the many features of several Advertising Packages, but the reader finds it very difficult to identify these features on a sample page. But this is necessary to make a decision.
You might think that it is better to let readers contact the platform to get more details (so that you can establish a personal contact and collect their data), but this is often too high a hurdle, and people will just go away.
Graphics
In some cases, some graphical elements can be quite useful, ideally allowing people to understand the important points more quickly while making the site look nicer. However, while this approach works well in some cases (often for the obvious messages), it is difficult to implement in others, for example when the content is more abstract.

For example, years ago I made a graphic that nicely illustrates the close connection between our RP Photonics Encyclopedia and the RP Photonics Buyer's Guide – see it on the right. I think that really works. But how can we clearly illustrate, for example, that our readers use product descriptions published on our site to determine which vendor websites to visit?
Simplified graphics often run the risk of misleading users – in our case, for example, they might think that this is just the usual thing of highlighting suppliers here and there (with more space, bold letters, logo display, etc.), as is done on many sites (often to little effect).
For these reasons, I often feel that some very well-written text will do a better job than a nice graphic. Even without any images, a web page can still look nicely structured with some headings, bullets, some “accordions” (see above), etc.
It is really important to make a page look nicely structured. Indeed, this is often a primary function of some graphical element – and a function which can also be fulfilled with other means.
Videos
We also use a new video that we made last summer with professional help. (Two more will follow soon.) Some users really like this format much better than reading some text, although I must say that the video format also has clear disadvantages in terms of usability:
- It takes some time to watch, and it is difficult to quickly find the information you need, or to find it again later.
- A search engine will usually not help you find something in a video.
And of course, making a video takes a lot of time – always more than you expect!
Still, it can be useful, as some clearly prefer that format – just sit back and watch! You can also easily post it elsewhere, such as YouTube and LinkedIn.
By the way, a video, just like many graphics, conveys a lot of additional information. That can be helpful – for example, somehow supporting the message –, or counterproductive, e.g. by distracting people or even creating wrong impressions. It may also catch people by surprise. In our video, for example, the preview is already far from what you would expect. You may wonder, is it really about marketing here, or rather about holiday locations? What has that place to do with RP Photonics? Some may be motivated to look into this video just to find out that.
How to Embed a Video?
Embedding a video on a web page is not technically difficult, but there are a few details to consider:
- Where should it go? When you put a lot of effort into a piece of media, you have a natural tendency to insert it wherever possible. However, it may distract or confuse people in places where it is not entirely appropriate. Also, if the same media preview appears on two different pages, people may think they have already seen that page and not look at the rest of the content.
- It can be technically easy to embed a video using code from YouTube, which also has the advantage that YouTube will count the views. However, this usually means that Google gets the IP address of every visitor to your site – which is a no-go for us, as it is not compatible with our strict privacy policy.
- If you most the videos yourself, you probably want to install some code which delivers media view statistics. This may go far beyond just counting the views; for example, you may want to identify those locations in a video where people often jump off. That can give crucial hints concerning what should be improved further. However, developing such code is not entirely trivial; if you cannot do it in-house, it may be difficult and expensive to get it.
Conclusions
Here are some take-home messages:

- Presenting complex offerings clearly and effectively is a difficult challenge. It requires multiple skills, extensive experience and a lot of time. Where the management understands this and allocates the necessary resources, this important task can be done properly.
- By the way, I generally hesitate to outsource such things, as I am afraid it would not come out well in many cases. Rather, I invest a lot of my own time into such things – they are important!
- The format of web pages differs from that of printed text in many ways. For example, it does not (and should not) enforce a particular order for digesting information, and it can use many useful features to present information in a convenient way. It takes considerable thought to understand all this. Mastering the technical aspects alone is far from enough.
- It is essential to understand the perspective of different types of users and their needs. By the way, I often try to get feedback from external people with a fresh perspective, not spoiled by what we insiders take for granted.
You can also see that we at RP Photonics are doing a very serious job on this site – not only presenting a high quality photonics encyclopedia, but also consistently working hard to serve very different types of users well. Only in this way have we been able to achieve this level of success – a platform that is extremely popular in the field, starting with photonics experts in industry and scientific research, and also with photonics marketing people.
This article is a posting of the RP Photonics Marketing News, authored by Dr. Rüdiger Paschotta. You may link to this page, because its location is permanent.
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