Writing For The Web Tips

Write at a level that makes sense for your audience. If you have a very young gaming crowd, you would write with lots of gaming slang and abbreviations. I might add if you aren't a gamer, it would be almost impossible for you to write at their level. They would know something was very artificial about your writing. You should hire a gamer to help you.

 

If you're writing on a stock market tips site, you better use proper grammar. People make an impression about you in part by the way you write. A person could see you make a grammatical mistake and immediately get a bad impression and move on to get their stock tips from someone more literate.

 

You will only use references to things your audience can relate to. For instance, if your market was stay-at-home moms, the word “Ellen” would immediately mean something to them. For those of you that aren't stay-at-home moms the reference is to “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” which is on during the day and very popular.

 

One of the main things you have to be careful of on the web is jamming too much text in too little screen space. Because of the nature of computer monitors many people can't stand reading on the web. They get eye strain, headaches and irritability.

 

– You must add lots of white space around your writing and keep paragraphs short. This in itself opens up more white space.

– Readers mostly scan web pages. You must use emphasis tags like bold and color to catch reader's eyes as they scan.

– We avoid underlining on the web because people think the text should be a clickable link if it's underlined. If it won't click, then people think there is something wrong with your site and leave.

– We also avoid italics, especially for small fonts because on a screen they look fuzzy and unprofessional.

 

We highly suggest you read anything by Jakob Nielsen when it comes to usability of a website. Here's a link to his findings about writing on the web