Crawford Kilian - Writing for the Web

Twenty-five years after Tim Berners-Lee wrote his first proposal for a large hypertext database with typed links, most of us dont know how we ever got along without the World Wide Web. Yet old habits die hard, and we still use the web with habits acquired in other media.

So newspaper websites still look a lot like newspapers. TV station websites offer lots of video. Business websites look like their ads in the Yellow Pages, only with more colors. And most website creators treat it like whatever medium theyre most familiar with: a sheet of typing paper, a radio, a canvas, a family photo album, or a Rolodex.

Websites can serve all those functions, but one of their primary purposes is to make large amounts of text available online. (The Latin word for web, by the way, is textus.) Graphics and sound can enhance the content of a site, but text remains the core.

The web is a very different medium from print, TV, and radio. But the habits weve learned in those media influence the way we respond to text on the computer screen. We even call web files pages when theyre nothing of the sort.

We read print documents in a certain way, using cues to navigate through a familiar format. The indented first line of a paragraph tells us a new topic is coming up. Page numbers establish a sequence were happy to follow. Indexes use alphabetical order to help us find things. Were so used to these conventions that we dont even notice them.

But print habits dont apply on the web. We surf through TV channels with our remote controls, and we bring the same attitude to the TV-like screens of our computers: deliver something interesting right now, some kind of jolt or reward, or well go somewhere else.

These responses demand a kind of writing that is different from other media not better or worse, just different. Effective website creation can certainly include excellent video, graphics, and sound. But it also means text that can interest impatient surfers and make them read what youve written.

This book offers some principles for composing text for your website. The principles arent carved in stone (how could they be?), but they arise from the experience of thousands of people writing online and on the Web over the past 25 years. We can draw some general conclusions from that experience: what works and what doesnt. We can also modify or ignore those conclusions if our own circumstances require us to. When George Orwell compiled his list of rules for clear writing, he saved the best for last: Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous. Good webtext has a lot in common with good print text. Its plain, concise, concrete, and transparent: Even on a personal website, the text should draw attention to its subject, not to itself. This book will give you plenty of exercises and tips for developing such a writing style.

Like good print text, webtext carries a subtext, a nonverbal message. The message may be, Im comfortable in this medium and I understand you, my reader. Or it may be, Im completely wrapped up in my own ego and my love of cool stuff. This book should help to sensitize you to any writing habits that may let the wrong subtext slip out.

I cant tell you how to design your site. But I can try to alert you to the likely results of your design decisions. For example, if you like long, long paragraphs full of long, long words, most of your readers will soon lose interest in what you have to say.

Similarly, if your text scrolls on forever, you will lose readers. If you build your site with layer after layer of linked pages, you will likely baffle and bore your readers.

If you are creating your own commercial site, or a personal blog, you decided the content and the structure: its topics, its size, how its pages connect, how its graphics, text, audio and video work together. For reasons Ill discuss, you can easily undercut yourself by presenting text as if it were still on paper. So its in your own interest to understand something about website design basics, especially as they affect the display of your text.