Writing is an art, but writing for the web can be quite a scientific experience. Especially, if you plan to capture the eyeballs of the fickle readership of this neo-medium! This book deals with the what, why and how of writing for the web. Not necessarily in that order or in those words.
Whether you are creating content for Corporate websites, writing promotional copy for Sales pages, developing your Personal websites, or updating your Blog, this practical guide aims to help you write effective web content that will make your visitors want to read.
You will get quick tips about how to cater to specific audiences, how to make sure that your content is the attention grabber that you want it to be, and how to get good search engine rankings for your web page.
You will also learn about the:
- Importance of hyperlinks
- Technicalities of a style guide
- Style rules for visual design and layout
And lots more…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A postgraduate in Communication from the University of Pune, Jyotsna Atre has over 14 years of writing experience in diverse communication domains such as advertising, journalism, corporate and training films, the World Wide Web, multimedia and e-learning. She has also handled teaching assignments as visiting faculty at the School of Communication Studies, (University of Pune).
Currently, working as an e-learning consultant, she develops instructional material for training programmes, multimedia applications and online learning. Through it all, writing for children and travelling remain her passions.
CONTENTS:
Introduction
It’s Different!
Where’s The Time?
Where’s The Space?
Where’s The Motivation?
Reader Rules
One Size Doesn’t Fit All
Use A Different Pitch
Corporate websites
Personal websites
Flash websites
Sales pages
Intranets
Blogs
E-commerce websites
Who Are You Writing For?
Target Audience
Categorically Speaking
Get Help
How Are You Going To Say It?
Make It Readable
Repurpose, don’t copy
The problem of plenty
Keep It Simple and Short
Be concise
Use active voice
Avoid jargon
Write for an audience of one
Some more tips
Edit, edit, edit – Quick recap
Linked-in
Pictures are worth a thousand words
Make It Scannable
Chunk de!
The inverted pyramid
Reduce scrolling
Headings are important
What grabs their attention
How to write headlines
Some more tips
Use subheadings
Use bulleted or numbered lists
Those Cool, Blue Links
Make links accessible
http://www.createlinks.com/cps/rde/xchg/au_division_web_link/hs.xsl/blue_text.htm
Write To Be Found
Search Engine Optimisation
Types of Engines
Crawling
Indexing
Ranking
Tips for good search engine rankings
Develop A Style Guide
Write Right
Layout Right
Glossary
AN EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK
It’s Different!
What is so different about writing for the web, you might want to ask. After all, almost all of us have done some kind of writing. And how different can writing school essays, or business letters, or newspaper articles, or a journal be from writing for a website? Doesn’t writing involve…well…just writing? Yes and no.
Writing is an art that is inborn. Take the school essay for instance. As we struggle to string our ideas on a piece of paper and hope for a passable six on ten, in our hearts of hearts, we know that the world is divided into two categories of people—those that can write and those that cannot. And if you belong to the first category, you know that there is more to your writing than just content. Form is just as important. Ask any talented writer and they will tell you that in this era of mass media, we need to be aware of the demands of the medium that we are writing for, be it the print, the screen or the web.
Ironically, although both print and web media involve publishing the written word for reading unlike the television, writing for the web is quite, quite different from writing for print. That’s because just like the print medium, the World Wide Web too has its share of strengths and weaknesses.
Where’s the Time?
The biggest weakness of the virtual medium is that its readers just don’t have the time. No one is logging into their accounts to read through a thousand words of skilfully crafted introduction (the way I am doing right now) and a body of argument that takes up 30-odd pages, before they finally get to read the climax of your story.
Try this typical ‘print’ method of writing on the web, and chances are that your reader will have clicked away to another web page or worse, jumped away to another website before you can even say your opening lines. Imagine what that means for the service or the product that you are writing for. Marketing gurus would compare it to committing hara-kiri! After all, the raison d’être of your (or your client’s) website is to get the visitors to read as much as they possibly can, so that they know all that they possibly can, as quickly as they possibly can.
Quite clearly, you are playing by a different set of rules here, and facing a difficult audience.
Where’s the Space?
That’s right. Unlike the print medium, where the reader gets a book, magazine, newspaper, brochure, or a leaflet that holds all the information together, the web offers you a single screen to work with. And if you thought that all those 1280 x 768 pixels belonged to you…think again! Logos, links, graphics, opinion polls, forms, copyright announcements…there are a thousand things in there jostling for space. And then there’s your text, in muted shades of grey that must make the point right here right now, else click goes your reader!
That means, when a visitor reaches your web page, you must be able to quickly give them the relevant information and persuade them to click on the ‘Next’ button, so you can talk to them some more. And repeat this cycle until they have browsed through your entire website, without getting bored or restless.
Where’s the Motivation?
Often, when a reader picks up a product from the print medium, they are loyal readers of the newspaper or magazine. Or they have heard about a certain author or a book and want to read the story. There’s a reason why they buy the product. But on the web, visitors usually reach your website accidentally—through search engines, through affiliate programs, or through links that they randomly find and think can yield information. Very rarely will anyone remember a URL and type it in the address bar to access your website.
Since they don’t actively seek you out, the onus to keep them interested and asking for more is on you.
Give them specific information that they can use, and they will stay. But upload some profound blah,
and no one will have the time or the inclination to read on.
Reader Rules
“…79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word.”
— Jakob Nielsen
But, why are web readers such an impatient lot?
1. Because reading text on the monitor strains the eyes, a person will read screen text far more slowly than when reading in print. In fact, on-screen reading can physically tire you after a few hours. So, reading on the computer screen is not a very pleasant experience.
2. Because readers are easily distracted if they don’t find the information that they are looking for. And if they can click on a link to reach your website, there’s the danger that they can also go somewhere else. After all, another website is just a click away.
3. Because, and most importantly, people don’t read web pages word by word like they do on paper. In fact, research shows that people scan web pages, focussing on particular words and sentences.
Surprised? Think back to your own surfing habits, and you will realise that ‘skim, scan, scroll’ is your own mantra on the web. You hurriedly skim through the content to see if there’s anything that might interest you. You scan to see if you want to read the written word at all. At best you quickly scroll the page, and then swiftly click the mouse.
What you are doing is corroborating research findings, which show that only a third of a site’s visitors will ever read a whole article. Eight out of ten visitors will go away after scanning the headlines, summaries, and captions. Fortunately, there’s a structure to their impatience. Readers will progress by scanning first for the headlines, subheadings, summaries, keywords or phrases and hyperlinks. In that order!
And as a web writer, this is your biggest chance. You can learn to use each of these as tools to effectively keep the visitors glued to your web page and asking for more.
In the pages that follow, we will see just how to do that.
Develop A Style Guide
Is it web site or website… should the full stop come before the quote or after the quote… what kind of bullet lists should we use…. These and many more questions are resolved when you put a style guide in place before starting work on the web content.
Style guides help in making your web text consistent in terms of spellings, grammar usage, and presentation. Plus, they make it easy for you to coordinate and seamlessly integrate the works of different writers if you are working with a large team on an ongoing project.
Write Right
Style guides are the standards for design and writing. Standards for writing define such specifications as punctuation, grammar, spellings, etc. This helps when working with a team of writers and editors, since guidelines for linguistic correctness are built into the content from the word go. It removes any doubts one might have about language and grammar technicalities, as well as a particular style of writing a word. For example, it helps you establish at the outset if
e-mail should be hyphenated, or the word Web should be capitalised.
Once the style guide is in place, every content writer in the team must treat it as the Bible of everything ‘language’. For that reason, make sure that you make it as exhaustive as possible, including not only the terminology and usage specific to your topic or industry, but also the styles for:
1. Writing numbers. For example, should you write numbers as numerals or should you spell them out, or what format should you use when writing dates, or time, or monetary figures, or measurements? The style guide tells you how.
2. Spelling and usage of technical and Internet terminology. For example, is it E-learning, e-learning, e-Learning?
Note: The thumb rule when creating guidelines for brand names or company names is to adopt your client’s style. For example, you cannot correct the name “Dreamz Unlimited” to “Dreams Unlimited” because your spellchecker says so. Spellings of company names and products are outside the authority of a style guide!
A major benefit of having a style guide is that it ensures consistency. It not only helps make your documents grammatically error-proof, but also helps your readers to identify titles, headlines, and subheadings in your documents while navigating. In the images given on page no. 63, notice the headline style (sentence case), subheadings (or lack of them), etc. give an immediate feel of identity to the web pages, although these screenshots belong to different sections of the website.
Layout Right
Let’s recognise it—writers are basically text people. And designing a website is a job best left to the designers. But sometimes it is possible that we are forced to double up as designers, especially when putting up an individual web page or if you are a small business owner working on a tight budget.
While this guide is exclusively for web writers, here are a few basic style tips for visual design and layout of web pages for easier reading:
1. Use white space. Remember that reading on the computer screen is different from a paper document. Tightly spaced text on a computer screen is hard on the eyes. So ensure that you use a layout that allows enough white space around
the text.
Tip: An easy way to do this is to enlarge the margins or narrow the width of text lines.
2. Use short paragraphs, bullets, numbered lists and tables in your layout. This will help the users to quickly locate the information they are seeking.
3. Make the important text bold to highlight it.
Tip: Avoid underlining words because on the web underlined words are hyperlinks.
4. Use colour to draw attention to important headings, subheadings or keywords. If you are having trouble figuring out a colour palette for your website, try to harmonise the shades with other elements such as your logo to create colour harmony.
Tip: Blue denotes hyperlinks. So avoid it while highlighting text.
5. Place your text on a contrasting background. Using black on white is a good practice that is also easy on the readers’ eyes.
6. Sans serif fonts make it easy to read on computer screens. Font size 10 is the standard for readability.
7. Avoid using animations, especially the loop animations, as they divert the viewer’s attention away from the website’s content with their continuous motion.
8. If you use images, make sure that they are small in size and easy to load. Users will invariably click away if they have to wait for different elements of a web page (videos, animations, images, sound, etc.) to load before they can see the content in its entirety.
9. Sometimes, it a good idea to give a download link if you want the reader to be able to access certain data from the relevant page. For instance, it’s a good idea to provide a .pdf link for a business plan template on a page that explains the different elements of an effective business plan. But don’t go overboard with the download feature. A website with several download links can get annoying.
Reviews about the book:
Writing is an art, but when it goes online, it’s a different ballgame. You may have written an earth-shattering piece, but as ling as it’s not presented in a visually appealing way, people won’t sneeze at it. With this book, learn the art of Web writing in simple, quick steps. Learn how to stylize your page and chip in interesting links to related snippets and facts. After all, it’s about catching eyeballs of a very fidgety, fickle-minded reader!
Times of India, March 28, 2008
Can you imagine life without the Internet? And, have you ever tried to interpret how you get so much of information on a single click? Of course, we all are thankful to search engines like Google and Yahoo for making life easier and satiating our information appetite. And also, many of us are undoubtedly interested in setting up our own web page, creating our own websites and writing blogs. But, rarely does anyone know how to get maximum hits on the piece of work.
While creating a website and writing a web page, the content plays a vital role besides flashy pictures, graphics and multimedia, and it is more importantly the text which helps the website get seen on search engines and hence, get number of hits.
With \'skim, scan and scroll\' being the basic mantra of net surfing, a web reader hurriedly skims through the content, scans if he wants to read it and then scrolls the page.
To make the content on a web page interesting and readable, a web writer needs to follow some basic fundas.
Writing is an art, but writing for the web is a skill that you need to acquire. While writing a creative piece, you can take liberties on the language usage. But, at the time of writing a web page, you have to be specific, clear and simple in your style as you are writing for web readers who are generally impatient and get easily distracted if they don\'t get the information they are looking for.
Chunking--dividing information into small and clear pieces, Search Engine Optimisation, ensuring that web pages are seen by search engines, and proper usage of keyword (s) are few common points that are kept in mind during web writing.
However, if you are keen to spread your message across globe through your online journals and blogs, or if you want to go for international marketing of your product via corporate website, you need to be more specific and learn the skill of web writing…
Keeping in view the shortage of time and changing reading habits, almost every organisation is going online. And, due to this transition, there is a huge demand for web writers…If there is demand, there has to be enough supply, and keeping this in mind, educational institutions are arranging special courses and trainings on web writing…
\'A Quick Guide to Web Writing’ written by Jyotsna Atre, is meant for all those who want to be good web writer. \'Keeping in mind the changing trends, we have launched this book for all those who are undergoing the professional web development training course, and for everyone who is keen to set up his or her own page,\' says Unicorn\'s Marketing and promotions head K N Sekar. \'In market, you can hardly find any study material on web writing. Even foreign publishers don\'t have much to offer. And looking at all this, we have come up with this book, that can be used by anyone,\' he added.
Part of this World Wide Web, many companies emphasise on good web writing skill. \'There is always a difference between an average stuff and a well-written stuff. Through flash, multimedia and hyperlinks, I can give a different look to my website, but the website would not get enough number of hits until it has good information in a readable format…With so many big names foraying into the web world and such big fat salaries being offered, isn\'t web writing a good career option? http://news.webindia123.com/news/Articles/India/20080309/904355.html
Webindia123.com, March 9, 2008
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