Top 3 Writing Tips for the Web
August 9, 2012
First, let us remember the top 3 rules of websites:
1. Content
2. Content
3. Content
… and since most of a website’s content is text, great web writing skills are super fantastically important! The irony these days, is that writing is often only considered as an afterthought.
By the way, that’s why social media websites like Facebook are typically doomed to eventually fail, because user-generated-content is usually crappy content, and the weight of that sea of useless material, typically crushes in on itself – like it did with Friendster and MySpace.
Let’s get to the tips …
#1 – Keep your paragraphs short
Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter these days because people are bombarded with information – there is just too much floating around. People will not read long paragraphs, so keep them short … 4-5 lines and maybe a little longer with really important and meaty parts of an article or blog post etc.
#2 – Make liberal use of bullet points
Ah yes, everyone loves bullet points, because it lets you easily scan a page for the information. Bullet points can be ordered:
1 – point of hierarchical order one
2 – point of hierarchical order two
3 – point of hierarchical order three
.. Use numbered list if the order of things is important. Or they can be unordered, when their order is not important:
– point one
– point two
– point three
#3 – Use a lot of sub headings
Sub headings (like bullet points) allow readers to scan the page quickly, they act almost like beacons or page markers, that guide the user like a roadmap. Use them when the focus of an article changes. If for example, your blog post is about classic cars, with each car model you talk about, give it a new sub heading and a paragraph to go with it.
Conclusion
There is a lot more to writing well for the Web (I could easily squeeze out another 5-6 tips), but this an article about the top 3 tips only … and after-all, it’s probably a good idea to keep it short.
Stefan Mischook
killervideostore.com
