The rules of fiction say in terms of pace

I better really grab your attention with something right now, or I'm going to lose you.

Web usability studies support it, too; you're four clicks deep (and answers should always be in less than three).

So let's try this for mojo-injection.

• A third of all e-transactions fail before completion.
• A bad headline, in a controlled intranet study, created a $5,000 loss.
• the American attention span has never been shorter.
• the speed of competition has never been faster.

Good lessons come from the birth of radio news. The writers were shocked at the brevity and the gravity of it all (How do you explain World War II in 50-word wibs*) They considered ever word to be precious, and their constraints turned into mastery.

Edward R. Murrow, for instance, describing anti-aircraft fire in the night sky of London: "like white rice tossed against black velvet." What a line. Plenty of content and visual to boot. "Content and visual to boot." Sounds an awful lot like the web.

As Murrow and Sevared and Kuralt made every word precious, Rule No. 3 contends every pixel is precious. A lot much be boiled into a little, and all that information must still combine message, tone and interface.

Not easy to begin with, and complicated by the pressure of knowing mistakes translate endlessly into little slowdowns and losses. >>>