1. Write as you talk. That means: use a simple writing style: plain English, short sentences, clear content and easy flow of ideas. Don’t use fancy words to show how smart you are. Guess what? People don’t care. You don’t want your readers to run to a dictionary to see what you mean.
2. Summarize your main ideas in clear titles and headings. This is what web readers are looking for: a clear formatted text with a clear structure of ideas. Start with the headline, continue with a summary, and use subheads to outline different ideas. People do read bulleted text. Use bullets or numbers to condense important points (yeah, as in this article).
3. Write less: people don’t like to scroll down on infinite pages. Long articles almost always turn them off. Keep your articles short – let’s say not longer than 500 words.
4. Chunk your web pages. As users prefer shorter pages, try to limit the length of your web pages by creating slices of information. Use links to help readers quickly locate further info.
5. To enhance reader experience, use visible links to more information, news, related sources, pictures and so on. Don’t mislead your readers. Let them choose which links to follow. As a standard, links are blue and underlined. But many designers choose other colors and a hover effect that suggests to users that the text is a link.
6. Write exciting content: people love controversy and learn from debate. Turn on their imagination, encourage them to comment and send you feedback. Use a personal, friendly style to win their sympathy.
7. Write for your readers but don’t forget about the search engines. Writing for the search engines might cause your phrases to sound odd and repetitive, but search engines are looking for keywords. Keyword density is one of the factors influencing the positioning of your website in the search engines results. So: repeat words but don’t annoy your visitors with this technique. Repetitive is not synonym with stuffing.
Content & usability: Writing for the web
Writing for the web is totally different to writing for printed matter. We tend to scan content on the web hunting for the information we're after, as opposed to reading word-for-word. As a result of this, there are certain guidelines you should be sure to follow when writing copy for your website:
1. Use clear and simple language
Reading from computer screens is tiring for the eyes3 and about 25% slower than reading from printed matter. As such, the easier the style of writing the easier it is for site visitors to absorb your words of wisdom.
Some techniques for using clear and simple language include:
- Use shorter words where possible - ‘Begin’ rather than ‘commence’, ‘used to’ rather than ‘accustomed to’ etc.
- Avoid complex sentence structures - Try to include just one idea or concept per sentence
- Use active ahead of passive words - ‘We won the award’ is shorter and easier to comprehend than, ‘The award was won by us’
2. Limit each paragraph to one idea
If you assign just one idea to each paragraph site visitors can:
- Easily scan through each paragraph
- Get the general gist of what the paragraph is about
- Then move on to the next paragraph
