TwoLittleFishes Blog

The most simple way to make text more easy to scan is by highlighting key words and phrases. The most obvious way to highlight text is by using bold or italics. Be careful though because if you highlight too much, nothing stands out.

When people are trying to find information on a Web site, they usually scan the text looking for key words or phrases. There are a number of ways to highlight text, although some of the ways that you might highlight text in other places should not be used on Web sites.

Don’t highlight key words and phrases by using:

• ALL CAPITAL LETTERS (using all capital letters is considered shouting and seen as rude);
• underlined text (underlining usually means that the text is a link);
• blue text (again blue text usually means that the text is a link).

Do highlight key words and phrases by:

• using italic text (this is sometimes called emphasis);
• using bold text (this is sometimes called strong emphasis);
• using numbers (e.g. 5) instead of words (e.g. five) for factual information (numbers help the text stand out among words);

As well as being considered shouting and seen as rude, capital letters are also more difficult to read. When text is all in capital letters it takes people longer to read because the letter shapes are less distinct than lower case letters. This can also be a problem if you use large amounts of italic text.

Don’t highlight too many key words and phrases otherwise nothing stands out. Only highlight words and phrases that help people find the right part of the page to get the information they are looking for or important pieces of information.

Many Web sites look good but have little or no useful content. Without valuable content, nobody will visit your Web site again or recommend it to their friends.

Valuable content

The most valuable thing on most small business Web sites is to give customers and potential customers information about the business and what it does. Probably the most valuable pieces of content you can include are:

• What do you do (e.g. Web site design, selling flowers),
• Information about your product/s or service/s,
• How to contact you.

You could also use your Web site to add value for your customers providing them with additional support. If you included an FAQ section, it gives your customers answers to common questions when they want them. It also stops you from answering the same question time and again.

Another way of adding valuable content is by including useful articles and information for your customers related to your products and services. This blog is here to help promote my services, but also to provide useful content to keep people coming back and to tell their friends about.

Keep adding fresh content

Just creating a site with valuable content that never changes will not keep people coming back.

Think for about TV, if your favourite program was on you would probably watch it. Now what if all it ever showed was the same episode over and over and never showed anything else? How many times can you watch the same episode of Top Gear on Dave?

The same is true of a Web site, no matter how good the information. If it never changes people will get bored and stop visiting it.

Some of the fresh content you can add to your site are:

• Articles and features,
• News (e.g. new products or services),
• Special offers (e.g. deal of the week),

Without valuable content people have no reason to visit your site again or recommend it to their friends. So whether you update your site everyday or just once in a blue moon make sure you have valuable content.

The best content is information about your products and/or services, after all that is what your Web site is there to promote.

We probably all know how to read and write, so why do we need to learn about writing for the Web. The basic reason is that we read differently on the Web.

Web sites are read in a very different way to either books or reports. The biggest difference is that with books and reports you usually start at the beginning and read all the words on a page until you reach the end. When you first visit a Web site you are often somewhere in the middle and very rarely do we read all the words.

Actually a Web site is read more like a magazine or newspaper than a book or report. But as we’ll see further on, Web sites are still very different from a magazine or newspaper.

How people read Web sites

The reason why writing on Web sites is different to books or reports is that people read them differently.

Most of the time when visiting a Web site we are trying to find some information, like how much it’s going to cost to post the book we’ve just sold on Amazon. This is where Web sites start to become different from a magazine, where we read articles because they are interesting. Some Web sites actually contain articles too, but here we are talking about general Web sites.

Because people are looking for information they just scan through the text until they find a pointer (a word or phrase) to the information. So most of the words you write about your product, feature or service never get read as people are just looking for keywords or phrases.

Writing Web site content for the way people read it

Now that we know how people read Web sites we can start to make sure the way we write helps people to find what they are looking for. Some of the ways we can do this are by using:

• highlighted keywords,
• meaningful titles and headings,
• conscise text and short paragraphs,
• conversational style,
• bulleted lists and numbered steps,
• an inverted pyramid

Over the next few weeks we’ll start to look at these techniques in more detail.

Next year I’m hoping start running some Web training courses and as part of running the courses I want to create some notes to go with them (and also sell the notes as a book). So this blog will be my way of putting ideas for those notes together, and getting some feedback on the notes as they are written.

The first course will be Writing for the Web, and I’ll be following that up with Introducing HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and Introducing CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

I’ll be posting a new section every 2 weeks on Friday, starting on 14th November 2008, so please come back then or subscribe to get the latest updates.