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April 19, 2004
Writing Web Content
(or would Faulkner make a good web author?)
The Internet has been around long enough to establish its own unique culture, state of mind and experience. Patterns of the visitors of Internet web pages have been monitored, studied, analyzed and synthesized by sociologists and 'cyberologists' in order to bring a 'zoological' set of results for the whole behavior and 'mating habits' of visitors and web pages.
It is however quite unfortunate that all those studies and results remain rather un-applied by the majority of the web site owners and authors that view the Internet as a new type of newspaper or magazine.
The Internet is definitely NOT a newspaper, a magazine or a book and there are definite rules for writing for the web that have to be followed in order to make a website 'succesful' (in whatever meaning one may give to this word).
I have assembled a list of the twelve commandments of writing for the web some of which actually haven't been followed here by the way. Feel free to peruse them, till you can feel at home with the ideas.
- Know thyself . It is important to have the clearest possible idea of what you are writing and for what reason. This may sound as an obvious point, but you will be amazed by the number of near-nonsense space fillers that exist over the web.
- Know thy reader. Make sure you understand before hand who you are going to write for and adapt to her level and ideas. Do not try to persuade people they are wrong.
- Be concise and clear. You do not want to write long and complicated paragraphs. Be as economical as you can in your articulation.
- The first words are important. Users often just scan the first words of the paragraph and never finish it if they aren't hooked by it. Find the mot juste.
- Be short. Long documents with plenty of scroll are usually abandoned. Nobody reads more than a couple of screen lengths. If you absolutely have to do it, break your text into more pages.
- Use bullet points and numbered lists . Readers will get more out of what you are trying to pass to them.
- Emphasize your text but do not over do it. Too many bold or italics in one page will disorient the readers and decrease the importance of the real emphasis points.
- Do not exaggerate. Try to be honest and state simple facts. People mistrust pompous expressions and promotional talk. 'You can't fool all the people all the time'
- Use clear fonts and plain backgrounds. I cannot even remember the times I abandoned a document written in yellow font over a textured background
- Integrate your text with any images . Your text and any images you will embed, will have to be properly integrated so that the image will not take precedence over the text (unless of course this is something you are aiming for). A picture may be a thousand words, but nobody likes someone that talks too much.
- Use hyperlinks properly. The language and trade mark of the internet is the hyperlinked text, so you should take advantage of the power of the medium. Keep in mind though that your visitors are one click away from your site. For ever
- Proofread and proofread again. It is an obvious point but it must be stressed that your documents must be free of typos and bad grammar. Respect your readers.
In other words, as much as I hate to admit it, William Faulkner, for some of the above reasons, wouldn't make a great web author (For unbelievers just checked the hyperlinked version of his masterpiece The Sound and the Fury). On the other hand Hemingway would make the perfect web author somehow. The rest of us can just try to compete.
Basil Drolias @ Rugles.com - Website Marketing Services
Posted by Basileios at April 19, 2004 05:33 AM
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