Informative and effective headlines

I've recently found a new and fascinating challenge at work. Our new page templates have very prominent news feature boxes which require short, snappy and informative headlines. I don't think we currently write the kind of headlines we need for this and I've been considering what we need to do to be ready.

In a freak coincidence, I received an alert from Nielsen's alertbox the very week I'd started to ponder this! The alert talked about the BBC's website and how effectively its editors write headlines every single day. Of course, this made me feel even more inadequate!

It's true though: on any given day a glance at the BBC's news homepage will give you a snapshot of what's going on without even having to click through further. In an average of 5 words per headline, that's a fairly effective job of editing.

So how can I use this information? First of all I'm reviewing 'titles vs headlines'. I think in most cases on SSAT's website we use titles and keep the same wording regardless of where these titles appear (on the page itself, in a list of links, as a featured story). I'm starting to edit these according to where they appear, so that the wording is different for an actual headline.

I'm also planning to use the BBC as an example (again) in some web writing workshops; perhaps a 'guess the story' game! Each of us can choose a story from SSAT's site and write a headline in 5 words, then see if others can accurately guess the story's content. I'll keep you posted on how well it goes.