“Garbage in, garbage out!”
Writing for your web site
Writing for the web is different than writing a normal document, as the web-visitor’s attention span is much shorter. There is a lot of information on the web and it is a matter of catching the visitor’s interest in a very short time.
- Short
- Write to the point and avoid marketing hype.
- Scannable
- People tend to skim instead of reading pages carefully.
- Summary first. Put the main points of your page in the first paragraph.
- Be generous with paragraph breaks and headings - they make pages a little more eye-friendly and easier to scan quickly.
- Try to summarise the content of each paragraph in its first sentence.
- Emphasise key words in a paragraph by making them bold or italic.
- Don't be afraid to use things like bulleted lists and tables - anything to make the information jump out at the reader, instead of making them sift through long paragraphs to get at it.
- Personal
- Write conversationally and personal.
- Answer users' questions.
- Use common language rather than made-up terms.
