Here’s a free idea for anyone thinking of redesigning a site: get rid of the FAQs. Each and every one. I hate FAQs. Hate, hate, hate, hate them. I hate them so much I’m not going to waste time making an FAQ image for this post. FAQs are a leftover from the interwebs era and seeing them today makes me sad. Why are they still around? We’ve come so far in other areas of content and web development, yet these crappy format still exists.  

FAQs: The beginning

Web development was mysterious and new when I started out. Programmers brought sites to life and designers made them pretty. Writers were sometimes in the mix but almost always as an afterthought. Programmers and designers usually wrote page copy and if they didn’t, they threw in some placeholder lorem ipsum copy for writers to replace. In everyone’s defense no one really knew what they were doing, but it was nuts and fun and we somehow launched sites.  

In time people realized they could put all kinds of information on web pages, and FAQs were born. My theory is that product marketing invented them. Once they realized there was a free-ranging text playground where they could shove tons of information at people they went nuts. To keep it fun they presented their boring product information in an interactive, question-and-answer format that would force people in a low-key, friendly way to read everything on the page et voila! The FAQ was born.  

At the time FAQs represented progress. They were one of the first places where people who weren’t programmers or designer types wrote for the web. They presented a lot of information on a page in an OK format. They also tended to get a lot of traffic, which initially signaled people were interested in learning about whatever the FAQ was about. 

FAQs: The end of fun 

Looking back I realize FAQs put the brakes on the early freewheeling spirit of the web. Instead of something helpful and fun they were something you HAD to write, and they always felt like a chore. I wrote my first FAQ when I worked at America Online’s Digital City Philadelphia. Someone in product marketing told me to write the fack for the Philadelphia launch. I had no idea what she was talking about and messaged her to find out. “Frequently asked questions,” she replied. “It’s the questions our audience wants us to answer.” I hadn’t seen these questions so I asked her to send them to me. “Oh, we don’t have any,” she said. “You have to write them. Just make them up.”

I sent my FAQ draft off to a radio-silent reply. No one proofed them, asked me to explain what I wrote about, nothing. I knew the FAQs were horrible and guess what? No one cared. All anyone cared about was that something was on the FAQ page. 

Guess what else? Twenty odd years later, we’re still pretty much there. FAQs haven’t evolved. They’re still horrible. No one cares about them until the launch date looms, then everyone spends an awful, fraught week trying to be the Nostradamus who can write the FAQs that will get past legal review. 

FAQs embody laziness. Nothing says “I don’t care about my site’s content, interactions, or users” more than an FAQ. They tell me no one bothered to think about how to create, or where to put, interesting content people want to read.  

Why hold on to this relic that makes everyone guess and dig around for information? Is it because everyone else still has one? Sure FAQs still get traffic but that’s most likely out of frustration because the FAQ is the page of last resort. No one wants to go there. FAQs are also a pain in the ass to write because no one thinks or talks like that unless they’re playing Jeopardy. Also, questions are rarely written well or answered clearly. It’s a lose-lose on all sides. 

FAQs: The ebituary 

This is why it’s time to Marie Kondo all the FAQs on your site. Get rid of them. Write them an ebituary so the rest of your content may shine. Here’s how. 

Go to your FAQ page and read every single one. Be ruthless and listen to your gut as you do this. If you read something and you think it doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t. Pay close attention to when you think the questions were written. Remember that unlike most people, FAQs don’t gain any wisdom the longer they stick around. If your site has FAQs there’s a high chance the information’s dated, either in terms of presentation or accuracy. 

As you do this you’re going to find patterns in the questions that point to…something. (And if you don’t, just get rid of them.) You’ll also find some golden nuggets of information along the way. Now go look at the rest of your site. Match up your patterns to existing site sections and see where you can incorporate your golden FAQ nuggets so they aren’t lost. Here’s a short list of where they can go: 

• Beef up your support section. Don’t have one? Write a few how-to or step-by-step articles.  
• Doing a redesign? Turn FAQs into copy that complements the updated site design. I recently worked on a vitamin site redesign and we took a bunch of FAQs and turned them into a fabulous “How to take a vitamin” infographic. It surfaces useful information to users right up front and looks great on any screen. The client loved it. 
• Beef up existing product content on product detail pages. 
• Sprinkle useful information across your social channels.  
• Add helpful instructions to a check out process, or other interaction.
• Make your “Contact Us” page more useful. 

I know it’s very, very hard to get rid of site content. But for 2019, let’s all drop some of that fear and just get rid of those crappy FAQs already. Once you’ve salvaged all the good stuff go get some sage and burn it over your keyboard as you hit the “Delete” key. Make an FAQ ebituary channel in Slack where people can gather, mourn, and move on. Let me know how it goes. Happy deleting!