Writing content for the web

Writing content for the web

Mike Hall | 5/11/2009

Writing for the web is very different from writing for print or other medias and needs to be treated differently accordingly.

In general, the majority of your audience will arrive at your site from search engines such as Google or Bing and they will have a particular task in mind. Depending on the nature of your site, they will mostly want to complete this task as easily as possible and get on their way.

Know your audience

It is important to write appropriately for you audience. There’s no point in patronising technical topic experts or confusing novices. Write appropriately!

KISS

Having said the above, you still need to Keep It Simple Stupid (KISS). It is approximately 40% harder to read online (that is to say it takes approximately 40% longer to read the same text on a screen as it does to read on printed material), so keep it short and to the point.
Use simple, plain language and keep to the point, omitting any unnecessary superfluous words.
You should also avoid repetitions. It’ s frustrating to read a synopsis or abstract for an article, then to be presented with exactly the same wording when you follow a link through to the main article.

Reverse pyramid

Start simple with short topic summaries and introductions and provide more details as people progress on their journey through your site.
Provide a clear hierarchy to your content both in terms of the site structure (information architecture), with effective and meaningful landing pages and individual page structures (interaction design), with a meaningful heading structures.

Small paragraphs

Keep your paragraphs short, with one idea per paragraph.
Start your paragraphs with the main purpose of the paragraph, to allow users to easily scan the page and only read what is of interest to them.

Make the copy easily scannable

Provide a clear and meaningful heading structure to further support the scan-ability of the page by  allowing users to skip to the bits they are interested in. 

Use meaning keywords for links. The meaningful words will standout to the reader and direct them straight to what they are after. Using ‘More’ and ‘Click here’ forces the user to read a lot of copy to determine  what the ‘More’ and ‘Click here’ links are about.

Bold relevant key words for the same reason, but avoid overdoing this as with too many bolded words, they will no longer stand out as much. 

Avoid capitalising whole words, this forces the brain to read each letter one-by-one in order to recognise the word, instead of recognising the patter of the word itself.
Use lists where appropriate for lists of related content.

Keep line length to approximately 80 characters. Users find it hard to find the beginning of the next line of text when the lines are much longer than this.

tags: Web Design