Web Advisor » Writing for the Web
Color
- Color and Web Design
- Less is More
- Importance of the Color
- Set the Mood in Web Design
- Color Psychology
- Choosing a Color Scheme
- White space
- Web Design Color Resources
Content
- Writing for the Web
- Scannability
- Writing to be Found
- Terms to Avoid
- Web Facts
- How to Write an "About Us" Page
- Five Usability Samples
- Special Characters
- Writing Content Resources
- Memorable slogan
Consumer concern
SEO
- Content Creation
- Choosing keywords
- Text and SEO
- Linking Strategies
- Custom "Error" Pages
- Keyword Ranking Factors
- Non-Keyword Ranking Factors
- Page Speed Factors
- Top Search Engine Ranking Factors
- SEO Resources
Bookshelf
Writing for the web is very different to writing for print. Visitors rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. 79% of users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16% read word-by-word. It is harder to read from a computer screen than it is from paper. As a result, Web pages have to employ scanable text, using :
- highlighted keywords or phrases
- short sentences
- simple sentence structure
- meaningful sub-headings (not "clever" ones)
- bulleted or numbered lists
- one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
- the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
- half (or less) the word count than conventional writing
- short page length
In print, your document forms a whole and the user is focused on the entire set of information. On the Web, you need to split each document into multiple hyperlinked pages since users are not willing to read long pages.
Make the word count for the online version of a given topic about half the word count used when writing for print: Users find it painful to read too much text on screens, and they read about 25% more slowly from screens than from paper.
Users don't like to scroll through masses of text, so put the most important information at the top.
Users can enter a site at any page and move between pages as they chose, so make every page independent and explain its topic without assumptions about the previous page seen by the user.
Web users are impatient and critical: They have not chosen your site because you are great but because they have something they need to do.
Update pages as time goes by to reflect all changes. Statistics, numbers, and examples all need to be recent or credibility suffers. Search engines consider fresh content to be greater value than outdated content, penalizing web sites that remain unchanged and rewarding web sites that maintain fresh content.