by Andrew Starling

...is not the same as writing for a printed publication.

Write Right

The key points are:

• People don't read Web pages the same way they read printed pages. They're far more likely to scan for keywords than start at the top and read every single sentence. So make pages easy to scan by using plenty of titles and break-up mechanisms - like bullet points and italics.
• Aim for brevity.
• Be wary of too much marketing-speak.
• Watch out for font legibility problems.

Learn from Print

On the crucial issue of scan-style reading there are lessons to be learned from the print world. The types of printed material people are most likely to scan-read are brochures and manuals. Although the two are very different, they can both teach us something.

Brochures go for eye-catching phrases, short sentences, a direct personal approach and show only a middling respect for the rules of grammar.

Manuals are another world. They know they're boring, long and unattractive. In compensation they try to break themselves up into clear sections with lots of titles, subtitles and keywords. A good manual will also add variation to large swathes of text with bullet points, italics, a change of font - anything that stops it becoming an undifferentiated mass of grey.

A Difficult Relationship with the Reader

The problem with brochure-style writing is that it's more suited to the short sprint than the marathon. After a few hundred words it can get pretty tedious. For longer text another style is needed - one that's sometimes called the "oral tradition".

The oral tradition can be summed up as "write how you speak", and although not everybody agrees about its roots, we can probably thank the great 20th century American novelists for introducing it to us. It's a nice tradition because you get to break the rules of grammar. Also you make less keystrokes. "I've" is shorter than "I have". The attitude of the oral tradition is that writing is a medium of communication, and if your message is clear then nothing much else matters.

The reason why it's good for the Web is that it's informal and often quite personal. This compensates for the fact that computers are highly technical and impersonal. Technology (and on the Internet it's in your face most of the time) creates a barrier that stops people relating to Web sites in the same emotional way they relate to books. TV has a similar problem but overcomes it through the personality of human voices. On the Web the only way to compensate is through the personality of writing.

Whether it's easier to write in the oral tradition than formally is a moot point. Skill still matters. A good piece of journalism online will still grab you whether it's oral or formal or broken up or in one big chunk. It just picks you up and carries you through to the end without you even noticing. That the skill factor.

Design and Legibility

The default properties for text on Web pages are Times font at standard size (equivalent to 12 point), black on a white background. You'll see this all over the Net and it's a decent default.

One slight problem is that Times - developed as the most readable font over centuries of printing - doesn't pixellate very well, so its on-screen legibility is poor at small font sizes. Arial and Verdana are better for small print, especially Verdana which was designed specifically for the Web. If you specify a font such as Verdana it may be worth listing alternatives to allow substitution if a machine doesn't have that font installed. For example <font face="Verdana, Arial">. Remember the font is determined by the viewer's computer, not the machine the page was designed on. Fortunately, these days Verdana is on most computers, including Macs.

Colour is a matter of opinion. Dark text on a light background is probably the easiest to read for long periods. Light text on a dark background is attractive for small amounts of copy, but isn't popular on major sites. Certainly it brings up a few legibility issues and reduces the apparent weight of the font.

You can't go far wrong if you follow the lead of popular Web sites. A few years ago the Web was full of overblown writing and poor presentation, but the biggest sites have learned from their mistakes and don't repeat them any more. Writing for the Web now has an established style that's known to work. All you need to do is spot the differences between this style and traditional hard-copy writing and follow the same rules.