This wiki is managed by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights to help keep marketers up-to-date with developments in digital marketing

From Marketing Online

The copy we carefully craft for websites is often evaluated in seconds as the site visitor rapidly scans what may have taken hours to creation, often for consumption in paper brochures.

Objective tests of writing suitability for audience can be useful to compare your copy to other sites targeting similar audiences.

These tools enable you to submit a URL for your site or a competitor to compare their readability.

While the results aren't definitive, they are helpful to bring attention to the importance of copywriting style and tone-of-voice within an organisation. They're certainly also useful to apply on copywriting training courses.

• Juicy Studio site readability tools - provide a URL for an assessment of the copy readability using the Gunning Fog, Flesch Reading Ease, and Flesch-Kincaid reading level algorithms.

I particularly like the Fog Index which enables you to compare to TV Guides or the Bible (6), Readers Digest (8), Time and Newsweek (10), academic papers and texts (15) and government coverup (>20).

• David Simpson's readability Test Tool Test readability by URL or pasting copy.

• Future Now "We-We" Test A simple test reviewing how customer-centric your copy is. You supply a URL and a %customer centricity value is calculated based on the proportion of words referencing conversational first person terms like "you, your" against the more company-centred "we, us".

• Plain English Guides PDFs available from the Plain English Campaign which offers the Crystal Mark accreditation for sites which are audited. The CIPD is one publisher with technical content which has this accreditation.