• Move the mission statement to an out-of-the-way spot, such as deep in the About Us area.
• Keep slogans out of running text. (They are OK in the header, or sidebars).
• Beware of enthusiastic adjectives and adverbs. These are the lint of marketing.
• Strip out those concentrated noun strings that marketing uses to summarize its pitch ("world-class enterprise solutions"). If you must make these claims, devote a sentence to each, preferably in a bulleted list. (You may need to increase the total number of sentences).
• Preserve the gist of features and benefits by focusing on nouns and verbs.
• Link to statistics, datasheets, detailed descriptions or numbers. Back up your claims.
• Increase the elements that your customers regard as trustworthy, such as quotes from experts whose name and photo you provide.
• Write in a neutral, objective tone. Or if you dare, commit to a very personal approach, revealing real details about your own life.

Usability was improved by a good deal in the objective language version (27% better). Our conjecture to explain this finding is that the promotional language imposes a cognitive burden on users who have to spend resources on filtering out the hyberbole to get at the facts. —Nielsen, 1997b.

Be direct. Studies have shown that simple, direct language works better on screen than flowery or "marketing oriented" prose. —Bricklin (1998).

The Web is a rather "cool" medium that encourages the use of facts with links to back-up datasheets and detailed numbers. —Nielsen (1999f, p. 101).

Users rarely look at logos, mission statements, slogans, or any other elements they consider fluff (in particular, they ignore advertising and anything that looks like an ad). —Nielsen (2000a).

Trust is less of an issue for newspapers, which usually have high integrity. Other sites need to fight for credibility and must reduce marketese, slogans, and other elements that generate distrust. —Nielsen (2000b).

Choose a tone that fits the message and the audience. Effective text features:

• Objective tone instead of promotional tone (for informational Web sites)
• Personal tone using the pronoun you (when appropriate)
• Plain instead of inflated, pseudointellectual language. …

[But] scannability and conciseness positively affected users more than objective versus promotional language alone. —Spyridakis(2000)

See: Bricklin (1998), Morkes & Nielsen (1997), Nielsen (1997b, 1999f, 2000a, 2000b), Spyridakis (2000).

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