The Web Is Not Print

Writing For The Web

You've got a spellchecker and you're gonna use it. Once typos have been eliminated print your copy and go through it with a red pen to catch mistakes the spellchecker missed. Test your text for readability. Read it aloud to yourself and to others. Record your reading and play it back. When it reads well and puts your points across succinctly and accurately you're ready to publish.

Your home page, usually the first page visitors see, is of prime importance. Make sure your mission statement encourages the user to explore the site. Write clearly and keep sentences and paragraphs short. One idea per paragraph—this applies to all content on your site.

Web users scan content rather than read it in the traditional manner.

Careful wording of the headers for your pages is crucial. That's the visitor's first clue the page contains information they are seeking. Use subheadings to indicate a page section's content. Use lists to group related topic information.

Develop an in-house style guide for your Web content. Surfing sites where each page has its own voice is distracting—unless you're visiting an ezine or online library.

Human/computer interface is impersonal and cold. Text on the Web tends to be more successful if it has a slightly informal and warm tone.

Don't waste a visitor's time by going on at great length about yourself or your company unless it clearly provides useful information about your products and/or services. Avoid jargon. Preaching to the choir will drive away a significant number of visitors. However, if you do want a narrower audience, using shop-talk on your Website is a good method by which to achieve that goal.

Give visitors lots of the specific content for which they came to your site.

Make sure your pages have strong concluding paragraphs.

Web pages are hypertext documents. Take advantage of this. Strategically embed relevant internal and/or external links in your pages.

10 Questions To Ask

1. Have you taken the time to draw up an outline of what information you want to include on your Website?
2. How much suitable content is already available in-house for use on your Web site?
3. How many pages of content need to be written?
4. How much content needs to be edited?
5. Will you have regular feature articles, reviews and/or announcements to add value to the site and encourage repeat visits?
6. Who will be responsible for refreshing and archiving all content on a regular basis—recommended minimum is once a month?
7. How much content do you plan to make available for download from your Web site in popular document formats?
8. Who will be preparing these versions of your content?
9. How much of the above will be done in-house, out-sourced, or a combination of the two?
10. Do you have copyright permissions for use of all content, including images?

Format

Save copies of your Website content as plain text. Plain text files are preferred for their ease of transfer into HTML documents.

In Word "save as ... plain text". In WordPerfect "save as...ASCII DOS text".

Do not use tabs, indents, hanging indents, "smart quotes", font styles such as italics, underlining, or sub- or superscripts.

Begin paragraphs flush left and separate them by a single blank line.

A plain text file may be as little as 1% the size of a word processor file with identical text.

Indicate hyperlinks, subheads, etc. on your hard copy. Give your Website builder both annotated hard copy and the document files via email or on CD.

Do not convert your documents to HTML via your word processor. Your intentions are doubtless good but cleaning up the inefficient generated code wastes time—the Web site builder's—and money—yours.

- Allan Ennist

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