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| Version | User | Scope of changes |
|---|---|---|
| Apr 18 2008, 5:53 AM EDT (current) | ssteward | 155 words deleted |
| Apr 7 2008, 5:00 AM EDT | SCodrington | 4 words added, 5 words deleted |
Changes
Key: Additions Deletions
| Writing for websites | |
| Think audience - have a strong customer focus. Visualise who you are talking to, and think about it from their point of view. What you say must make sense to someone who doesn’t know anything about what you are talking about. Start with what concerns your web visitor (the product), not with what you’ve been doing (the process). The first sentences must get their attention. Speak directly, sound human. Webspeak is much more informal than what you see on paper. Keep your sentences short. This is not a corporate brochure. Jonathan Briggs of the Other media recommends this Other media website as a good example. http://www.zsl.org/zsl-london-zoo// Pictures liven up a web page, even if not 100% relevant, as you can see here. Keep down the number of K - make an image the same size as it appears on the web page, and 72 dpi. Web structure and accessibility Take your visitors on a journey. They are just passing through. Where will they go next after this web page? Give them something to do next - where to go, opportunities to comment. Make it very accessible for people in a hurry. Enable them to find what they want – or what you want them to find – quickly. People do not read a website in a linear fashion, but jump around, focussing on things they recognize. Break up the text with lots of headings. For an example of admirable clarity see the Action for Blind People website which the Other media have recently produced. http://www.actionforblindpeople.org.uk/ User-generated copy This brings your site to life and helps visitors to relate to it. But how much quality control do you need? - does bad copy reflect badly on your organisation? (May be health & safety issues too in what the Nuffield Curriculum Centre produces.) Passage of time Always have something new on your site. Keep refreshing the home page. This will encourage repeat visits. Check through your site frequently to update or remove out-of-date stuff.Copy-editing Have some style guidelines so that there is some uniformity across a site with several editors. It is particularly noticeable if the heading structure is different in different places. But if you have different sorts of stuff and you want different voices, allow people to speak for themselves as a magazine does. Keep your writing style informal, but grammatically correct. Typing errors are not your main problem but avoid these too if possible. Errors make a bad impression, and people will think what you have to say is sloppy too. Technical stuff Wizzy technical things and knowledge of how to run the site are both bottom of the heap. It’s what you say and how you say it that’s important. by Sarah Codrington |  |
