When writing for the web start with the most important conclusion, then work down to the facts that lead you to that conclusion. That is a nutshell how you write for the web.

This is because people read differently when they visit a website. Most of the time your visitors will be looking for some specific information and scan the text to see if this is where they can find what they’re looking for.

Titles

Because of this you should also use titles, titles are extremely useful when scanning information. This is why you not only should use titles, but use descriptive titles. The title for this post is ‘writing for the web’. Which is exactly what this post is about. ‘The web, how to write for a site’ would also describe this. However, as this site is about webdevelopment ‘The web’ doesn’t add much. I could actually just leave that, only ‘writing’ would be a bit short again and just for clearity I’ll keep the ‘for the web’. I’m sure it’s clear why ‘How to ramble like a madman’ isn’t a good and descriptive title.

Lists

A list is generally used for a short list of phrases that are important in some way. And as such, your visitor will scan this list to see if there is anything interesting. So, try and use lists when appropriate to give your visitors something to scan.

Short sentences

As most people don’t read long texts on their computer you’d do best to keep your texts short. There is an easy way to do this. Just write your text as always then, read it back and delete any words you don’t need.

Summary

There are 5 ways to make your text easier to read for your visitors.

• Start with the conclusion
• Scannable text
• Titles
• Lists
• Short sentences

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 9:10 by Sonja Duijvesteijn and is filed under Webdevelopment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.