A visit to any website reveals that all cyberspaces – good or bad – contain text. Think of any horrible ones? Click on the link to see some Web Pages That Suck.
Properly designed and organized text generates eyeball appeal. Words tie the whole website together – be it image tags or paragraphs.
What constitutes good web writing?
- A balance between user needs and business goals:
- Knowing what your users need and how to present it.
- Help the user accomplish a task.
- Be consistent
- Answer user questions
- Knowing what your users need and how to present it.
- Having a good strategy
- Following the rules of good composition
- Being able to solve content problems to ensure that the voice, tone, style, business objectives and customer goals are met.
- Having solid web design and development e.g. knowing how to break text into visually appealing blocks.
- Having good metadata that helps your website become more visible to search engines and findable by users.
- Understanding the online/offline user experience.
Goals and expectations of online and offline users differ. Online readers are task oriented – they know exactly what information they require and want to get it in the shortest time possible and move on.
On the other hand, offline readers are passive and relaxed readers.
- Taking into account all your users even the ones that lack visual abilities and access the website through screen reader devices.
- Engaging content
Good web writing has the ability to solve business problems and can help an organization form a lasting relationship with its customers. It can also help strengthen the company brand and solve many business problems.
Some challenges that come with web writing:
- Not being part of the design process from the inception.
- A website is a representation of the firm as a whole and therefore ensuring cohesiveness might present a challenge as each business entity within the organization might want content written in a specific way.
- Also, lack of editorial oversight as no one part of the business owns the material thereby leaving web writers without clear leadership.
TOP 10 WEB WRITING TIPS
- Love the inverted pyramid.
- Believe less is [almost always] more.
- Avoid sounding like an infomercial.
- Make your copy easy to scan.
- Write killer headings.
- Lead with Active words
- Use simple sentences
- Keep your promises
- Set up a good review process
- Benchmark off good websites
